


Thrice Fallen

by Lana_Morrigan



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, BAMF Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley is a Mess (Good Omens), Crowley swears a lot, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Smut, Hell, Hell Trauma, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Promise, descriptions of torture, it will be okay in the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2020-12-27 05:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 29,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21113075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lana_Morrigan/pseuds/Lana_Morrigan
Summary: "Dimly, Crowley is cognizant - as he always is - that it may not be sensible for an Occult being who is sneered upon by both Heaven and Hell to drink himself into obliteration, alone and without defenses.That will be Future Crowley’s problem. Future Crowley’s life is frequently orchestrated to near ruination and destruction by Past Crowley’s actions. Future Crowley has a lot to say about Past Crowley, much of it bitter and invective and most of it at high volume..."





	1. Chapter 1

Crowley gives the paperweight a long look: it’s brass, milled glass, and ugly; a bad Victorian reproduction of a 16thcentury silver and crystal piece. He bats it lazily off the desk with the palm of his hand. He watches its fall and demise upon the floorboards from behind his glasses with dragging apathy.

Aziraphale recognizes bait when it’s dangled in front of him, especially the irksome sort of bait Crowley enjoys when it’s meant to goad and not to entice. He purses his lips, puts down his book and glances meaningfully at the Demon. An explanation is owed.

“I hang out with a lot of cats.”

“You - hang out with cats? And where would that be exactly? At the local rescue shelter?”

“Cats are evil - everyone knows that. I invented them.” His assurance is hollow.

The Angel doesn’t know what this game is but it’s happened before. If he must hazard a guess he’d say that Crowley was seeking both attention and a deflection at once: there’s something bothering him. Something that hurts and he wants rid of even as he refuses to talk about it. “I happen to know,” Aziraphale reminds him, “because you have told me - that cats, or their natures at least, were created by Pasht-Sekhmet, a collogue of yours who was busy in Egypt for a time.”

Crowley’s expression does something complicated whilst his face does something even more complicated to hide it. Seeming out of options, he shrugs and then flings himself into the shabby embrace of the old leather sofa at the back of the bookshop, spreading out across the cushions like a particularly elegant and irritated gothic starfish.

Aziraphale isn’t bothered by the destruction of the paperweight - it's insignificant: either of them could snap their fingers to order it whole and sitting on the corner of the desk once more, pinning an incomplete shopping list to a nicely bound copy of Le Morte D’Arthur. (Neither of them do.) More significant by far in the Angel’s eyes is Crowley: he looks pale and unsteady in a way Aziraphale can’t pinpoint - that’s the worst of it - he looks like someone who hasn’t just missed a step but an entire staircase in the dark and Aziraphale can’t fathom why. “Crowley, are you…?”

He tries to give a shrug that radiates indifference. The attempt chronically fails, but at least he tried. “Mm fine,” comes the slurred and sulky answer.

“But…”

“Go away, angel.” His voice should sound supremely irritated - should have snarled with heavy aggression. It barely scrapes by tired. Worst it sounds finished - done - in a way that Aziraphale has never heard in all the millennia they’ve shared.

“You’re in my bookshop,” the Angel in question points out mildly. “You seem on edge.” He doesn’t know what’s happening, and he hopes Crowley does - one of them ought to after all. The Demon has an undertow to him that seems darker than his run-of-the-mill instances of surliness.

He smiles queasily and gives a little salute. “Naah, just my winning personality.”

“Dearest, you may dress like a raincloud in human form..."

“Balancing out your naturally nauseating habit of being a sunbeam…”

“But,” he battles on, raising his voice slightly, “your mood is habitually cheery for a demon…”

“Fomenting bad deeds,” he mutters, convincing no one.

“…Apart from today. What’s wrong?”

The mouth thins beneath the obsidian of the sunglasses. “Nothing.”

Aziraphale knows that tone and doesn’t care for it. That’s the tone that says, ‘I’m a Demon - literal Hellspawn. I’m tough. I’m fine. I don’t need help. I don’t need anything - least of all you. And if you dare pity me I’ll stab something. Probably me…’

“I’m worried about you…”

“Your specialty, innit, worrying?” he tries but he has the wan look of someone who knows they’re not getting out of this alive.

This is the thing about Crowley. Anyone who meets him recognizes it, even if they don’t have the words for it. They may describe him as ‘a flash bastard’ or ‘intense’ or ‘that unsettling wanker in the sunglasses’. But what they mean, what they’re really picking up on, is the one inescapable quality that radiates from Anthony J Crowley like cancer from plutonium. Crowley is so sharp he might just cut himself. Crowley is lost - has been lost for a long time and tells himself he likes it like that. He’s lost and a bloody mess, frankly…

Anthony J Crowley is a knife looking for a wound.

* * *

Angels are beings of Love and Grace: they’re full of it. Which, Crowley thinks, might be what makes most of them so insufferable, so stuffy, with all that righteous beneficence.

That all goes away when you Fall, of course - it ribbons out of you, unspooling from your chest like a golden thread yanked from your heart. And then the thread snaps, and there’s nothing behind your sternum, just an empty spindle rattling round like a splinter inside you.

(It’s why most Demons are so adept at sin: they’re all just sad little junkie rebels, jittering from one fix to the next, trying to distract themselves from the gnawing emptiness in their souls once their Grace had been torn out. It’s why most Demons are so vicious too: they can’t make the pain go away and so they do the next best thing and pass it on. Misery loves company after all.)

Crowley is not most Demons. Perhaps the tiniest scrap of Grace - a single, frayed thread - remains within him. Perhaps, with the help of Imagination and millennia of Self Deception he’s managed to convince himself that wound in his soul has healed - was never even there in the first place. It would be far easier for Crowley if either of these things were true, but alas, they’re not.

The spindle lodges in his heart like a stake, a constant pain, and the space behind his sternum is a black hole - a howling maw of endless Want. Worst of all, what it Wants most, is the Angel. It radiates from him, this nervous, greedy, incandescent and burning energy, sizzling from his pores, glinting in his smile, flashing in the gold of his eyes. He tries to fold it away like his wings out of sight, tries to smother it, pressing it down, kicking it into submission with callous brutality.

**He called us ‘dear’. **

_He calls everyone ‘dear’. _

**He likes our company. **

_Oh please - he’d dine with Satan himself if he came in carrying a plate of pear tart and a bottle of Le Pin ’82. _

**He’s kind to us. **

_No, he’s polite - he’s an Angel. _

**He likes helping.**

_No, he likes being better at things than us and proving it._

**He’s happy when he sees us - the way he says our name.**

Crowley is momentarily stumped at this one. It’s true, Aziraphale often sounds delighted to see Crowley, is in fact the only person in existence to ever sound happy about seeing him.

Encouraged by the lack of denial, the Want pushes on. **His hair looks soft.**

_Oh no you don’t - keep your bloody fingers to yourself! _

**His lips look softer… **

_Ngk!_

Aziraphale watches with a bemused sort of concern as - after sitting slumped on the sofa for ten minutes doing nothing but staring into space and scrunching his long fingers against his sternum - Crowley levers himself violently off the sofa and almost pitches straight into the table, somehow correcting his trajectory at the last second. His shoulders are hunched and his hands hastily stuffed into his pockets. “’M going for a walk.”

“Oh - St James’s? I have some frozen peas - we could feed the ducks…”

“Nah, I’m - I’ve - got business to see to.”

Aziraphale’s expression dims. “Ah, of course, I didn’t mean to monopolize your time. Work related, is it? Are you late on your monthly reports again?” He tuts. “I well know how middle management get. They say jump, you say…”

_“From how high?”_

The Angel stops and stares at him.

Crowley’s expression is queasy and brightly aiming for ‘mild sea sickness’. “What?” he tries.

Aziraphale knows when the Demon won’t be drawn out so moves on instead. “Will you be back this evening, or will I see you on Wednesday?” They have, since the Armageddon-That-Wasn’t taken to dining at the Ritz at 8pm every Wednesday.

“Something’s come up,” Crowley mumbles. “I’ll call you, yeah?” he throws over his shoulder, already walking towards the door, a skinny jumble of bad attitude, artfully messy hair and sunglasses.

“Mind how you go,” the Angel calls after him with a concerned frown as the shop bell jangles forlornly above the door.

* * *

He swallows; his throat feels so raw with emotion he’s surprised it’s not bleeding. The Want is seeking to rise up, crawling up the back of his throat, burning like bile…

He isn’t certain why he’s been singled out for the starring role in this particular cosmic absurdity. The Almighty, in his opinion, has a rather sick sense of humour and it certainly isn’t one he appreciates. Oh yes, laugh it up: very funny, haha. Let’s have a Demon fall in love with an Angel. Let’s watch what happens next! _(It’s probably, _he thinks bitterly, _why She created popcorn.)_

It hadn’t been so bad at first, but that was because he hadn’t realized - poor benighted bastard that he was - what had happened.

On the walls of Eden, slithering up to the Angel stationed there; he’d done it out of a mix of curiosity and that itching desire to cause mischief, the two things he’d never been able to resist. To stand there and rib an Angel about Humanity’s Original Sin - a sin he’d just tempted them into? - Brilliant! Now grin about the lost sword - go on - it’ll be a good joke!

Only in a single moment, the tables had been turned and the joke was very squarely on him.

“I gave it away!” the Angel had said, all anguish and blond curls, and then had started babbling about how (without pause or a second thought, Crowley noticed) he had given his flaming sword - a Heaven-forged weapon - to Humanity to keep them safe in the wastes of Nod that lay around the oasis of Eden.

Crowley’s heart had given a delighted little shiver and had seemed to grow too large for his chest. He’d assumed it was amusement he felt at the Angel’s expense: a spiteful sort of pride in reaction to the Angel’s foolishness. (If Demons might Fall for speaking out of turn, this white-winged idiot was royally fucked; he’d be face-first in a lake of Hellfire in no time…) His heart did something else when he thought about that - constricted somehow, half bloody strangled itself - and the smirk soured on his face and congealed until he had to wipe his lips with the back of his hand because he felt… _wrong _somewhere deep inside and didn’t want the evidence of the malaise on his face.

It took him a while to realize his heart did that every time he saw the Angel. (The violent sledge-hammer pulsating, not the razed-to-the-ground-and-sown-with-salt-feeling, thank - …Someone.) It was difficult to describe as a experience: it was as if his heart didn’t beat unless Aziraphale was there - as if he couldn’t take a full breath, and it was only when the Angel looked at him with those stupidly shining eyes of his, that breath forced its way into his lungs in a rush and his heart beat like it was trying to bludgeon its way out of his chest. It hurt, truth be told, and yet he kept seeking out the Angel’s company, his fingers curled against his palms, his nails digging in, waiting for that dizzying rush, that little jolt of agony and the strange warmth it left in the hollow of his sternum afterwards…

Had that been all that happened it would have been bearable, but like most heady sensations, the Serpent of Eden started to grow inured to it. No, not inured - addicted. And each time the warmth faded from his chest, the void where his Grace had been grew hungrier, its gnashing teeth more insistent, its Want more feral.


	2. Chapter 2

Years turn to decades, decades to centuries, centuries to millennia, until finally Eden’s Serpent begins to wonder how it would feel to trace his fingers over the papery skin of the Angel’s wrist and to feel the steady pulse of his blood, so close beneath the surface. He wants to press his lips against the heel of the Angel’s palm, to delicately lick the mound of his thumb and taste the salt and sunlight of his skin. He wants to feel the feather-down of blond curls beneath his fingertips because they look like the softest thing in all Creation. Wants to run his hands across the tip of one star-bright white wing. He Wants, Wants, Wants…

But he cannot _have;_ which is an unusual irony for a Demon.

Demons are the ones doing the tempting - that’s how it works. Occult Beings turning up with honeyed words and silken wiles, promising Humanity anything they want - anything at all - if they just lean in a little towards the dark.

_(You can have anything you want, angel - just let it be me. You can do whatever you like - anything - everything - please...) _

But if he ever utters those words there’s no way it would ever work out right, and a thousand and one ways it would end up wrong. He’s thought about it a lot over the years, running through the scenario in his idle moments or when the howl of the Want grows too deafening, clawing at his back teeth.

_You stupid bastard, _he screams back at it. _How do you think that would play out? At best he’ll think I’m joking and tell me to shut up - think I’ve gone round the sodding twist. At worst he’ll be offended - disgusted - he’ll get all righteous. We’ll be struck down, smote from existence! Or… _And here his snarl quiets because there’s only one thing in Creation worse than utter obliteration and the thought terrifies him so much he has trouble articulating it even in the smooth bone-walled privacy of his own skull. _Or… or he might not kill us. Just loathe us instead. Can you imagine that - can you, you insufferable wanker? Can you imagine how it’ll feel to have him look at us with revulsion?_

The Want has always keened after that, subsiding back to quiet whines, the fear of that threat overcoming its naked hunger for a time. But never for long enough.

He wonders sometimes, when the splinter-spindle twists in his heart and the Want gnashes in his chest, fierce as Fenris set to devour the sun, he wonders what might have happened. If he’d kept his smart, pretty, idiot mouth shut instead of trying to be clever. If he’d never questioned - or at least kept his questions to himself, toeing the party line. If he’d never Fallen…

He wonders again, trudging down Old Compton Street, away from a bookshop he can no longer bear to be in and an Angel he cannot look at right now. And then he figures it out, because whilst Anthony J Crowley may be a bit of a fuck-up in the eyes of both Heaven and Hell, he’s actually quite clever. What he works out is this: if he had never Fallen, his Grace would still be a burning halo of warmth and infinite love for Her around his heart. He would not Want anything - none of the Host ever do, they have all the bliss they could possibly need.

Next he follows this thought - knife to a wound - lamb to the slaughter - to its conclusion: _by extension, Aziraphale will never - can never - Want him._

The splinter jabs so violently in his chest it almost floors him and he doubles over with a gasp, grabbing onto a convenient lamppost to steady himself, Wardour Street tilting around him. Dimly he wonders if he’s going to be sick.

“You alright there, mate?”

Crowley can’t bring himself to look up to see who asked. He gives an unbalanced smirk, the expression canted unsteadily on his lips, half a moment from falling off. “Absolutely tickity-fucking-boo,” he grinds out before wheeling round and heading unsteadily in the direction of Regent’s Street and Mayfair. He’s going to hole up in his flat and drink an inordinate amount of alcohol and then he’s going to pass out and sleep until he doesn’t feel the need to punch a hole in reality and scream into it - however long _that _fucking takes.

* * *

Demons are not meant to be cheerful by nature, although they are fully expected to be gleeful about the sullying of humanity’s virtues to damnation and for a good bit of sin or torture. If you asked Crowley, he would say he isn’t cheerful - he’s never cheerful. (If you asked Aziraphale you would receive a very different answer.)

Leaving aside the quantity of happiness Crowley may or may not project at any given moment, one thing that’s true (and the Demon himself will shrug and admit it) is that Crowley is an optimist. He’s wriggled out of Heaven’s stifling clutches - even if that had only been _accidentally _on purpose - and has to an extent managed to wriggle out of Hell’s infernal fingers too by getting himself posted on Earth. Even Earth - which is more home to him than Heaven or Hell ever managed - has improved itself over the millennia. One cannot live through the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Plagues of Egypt, the 14thcentury, and wars and pandemics in general, and not admit that the world’s come along marvelously.

(Indoor plumbing and double glazing are prime examples. So are cars, the internet, smart phones, cinema, sushi restaurants, and hygiene products that didn’t contain crocodile dung, arsenic or white lead. These have all improved Crowley’s world no end - cheers to you, you clever, _clever _humans.)

But optimism, unlike bastard spite in Crowley’s case, is not an inexhaustible resource. At its core, optimism is the ability to imagine that a situation will turn out for the best and then believe that with a beacon of passion that lights your way. And in the case of Aziraphale, Crowley’s imagination has reached its limit.

Angels were created to adore and serve the Almighty: they’re full of Love and Grace (and in Sandalphon’s case violence, in Gabriel’s righteous bullshit, and in Aziraphale’s often a glass of tawny port and a slice of raspberry cheesecake from Maison Bertaux, but this has little bearing on Crowley’s logic.)

Aziraphale will invariably continue to adore the Almighty, love the world, and be fond of Crowley in an exasperated way that only six millennia of familiarity could possibly breed.

Crowley’s love towards him - this wild, tempestuous void of Want - will be unwelcome. Another irony to add to the mounting pile threatening to crush him. _(More weight - more weight! _wheezes some ghost of history long past. Crowley doesn’t recall the man’s name and he knows Aziraphale will - they were both there in Salem after all. _Moooore weighttt…)_

_Your pain’s over, ghost! _He thinks savagely. _You had your martyrdom - leave me the fuck alone to mine. _His hand still clutches at his sternum like a claw. He can feel the rocks of Never-Was-And-Never-Will-Be start to heap upon him from all the way back in Eden. The stones are piled on with every word he acknowledges as true, for every day he’s been on Earth: _Crowley - a Demon, incapable of love - loves an Angel. And the Angel - so full of love for all creation - will never love him back. _

52,770384.

Fifty two million, seven hundred seventy thousand, three hundred and eighty four rocks are a terrible weight, even for a Demon to bear.

_Fuck you, _Crowley thinks with sable rancour, lifting his eyes Heavenwards, before blinking them back down like storm-shutters to try to rid himself of the tears intent on drowning his lashes.

* * *

Crowley has always been very particular about his appearance: to whit he likes to simultaneously look debonair and also like he doesn’t give a shit about his appearance at all. Effortlessness takes rather a lot of effort, but over the millennia he’s got very good at it. (Besides, who needs two hours of being fussed and primped over by a barber or hairdresser when a simple snap of the fingers can achieve the same result?)

Alone in his flat, Crowley does not look effortlessly rakish: he looks slouchy and stricken and suspiciously like he’s been crying now he’s taken his sunglasses off. He turns the music system on, not bothering to check the album or playlist; it’s not that he doesn’t care, but his nerves are raw and he has no idea what music will help and what will make him want to throw things against the wall. He drops his jacket on the floor by the coffee table and goes to the kitchen to find a tumbler and copious amounts of scotch. The glass is located with ease, the scotch less so. (Crowley has forgotten that he and Aziraphale drunk the last bottle of Talisker a week since.)

“Whisky,” he growls as he flings open cupboards. “Where’s the _blessed _whisky?”

It has been previously mentioned that Crowley’s fridge remains well stocked with food from Fortnum’s and Selfridge’s: the food doesn’t go off despite the fact the refrigerator has never been plugged in because the Demon hadn’t bothered to consider that appliances require electricity. As far as he’s concerned, they are different shaped boxes that humans invent to do individual jobs because they can’t perform miracles. Crowley has never been introduced to the concept of wiring, electronics or mechanics. The kitchen cupboards, either following the fridge’s good example or capitulating from sheer terror because they think they know what happens to the sub-par house plants, sensibly produce two bottles of 18 year old Talisker, two bottles of 30 year old Laphroaig, a bottle of Blanton’s Single Barrel, and one of Warre’s 1945 port the next time the Demon wrenches the doors open.

The glass and selection of bottles is transported to the sitting room after which Crowley drops down onto the sofa with the look of an emotionally fragile person who is enormously relieved they can now invest their full attention to drowning their sorrows so their neurons can shut the fuck up.

The Sonos system is playing something he doesn’t approve of -

_“'Cause I'm only a crack in this castle of glass, _  
_Hardly anything there for you to see…”_

\- and he glares at it. It obediently flicks on but he can’t stand that one either after the first two lines -

_“Say goodbye, as we dance with the devil tonight   
Don't you dare look at him in the eye…” _

The damn thing didn’t actually skip on until a few lines after and the next song that stutters on is worse.

_“Shallow breath_  
_A desire for the deep_  
_Wasn’t made for this_  
_All the secrets that I keep…” _

Crowley makes an incoherent sound of rising fury. The songs skip on.

_“‘Cos love, like an invisible bullet_  
_Shot me down and I’m bleeding_  
_Yeah I’m bleeding_  
_And if you go furious angels will bring you back to me…”_

“Fucking well stoppit, would you?!” the Demon shouts. Another time, another situation, Crowley would have growled, ‘Are you _mocking _me?’ in a tone that was all silk and teeth, and then melted the Sonos player and half of his music collection out of existence, original vinyl (quite literally) be damned. “This is _my _flat!” he reminds anything close enough to listen. He has a nasty suspicion he sounds petulant; he doesn’t like it. Petulance is for children, not aeons old Occult Beings of formidable power. Alas, Crowley doesn’t feel like an aeons old Occult Being of formidable power, he just feels… lost.

“Have some bastard respect and sod off!” He screams at the Sonos player. His voice sounds peeled with hurt and bleeding frustration, but at least he doesn’t sound petulant any more. The Sonos very sensibly selects to play 'Venus in Furs' and after that some classic Eric Clapton. Crowley’s rage simmers back to more bearable levels and the houseplants stop cringing in mute terror.

He sits on the sofa, although somewhere through the second bottle of Laphroaig he slithers off and ends up sprawled on the floor, leaning his head back against the cushions.

It is an immutable law of the Universe, that when we most need a little peace and quiet from the roaring engine of our own thoughts, that is inevitably when they pipe up, rising noxiously like stench from a plague pit.

_What would Aziraphale say if he saw you now?_

That thought is particularly wounding because Crowley is certain that what the Angel would say is, ‘Oh good Heavens!’ and what he would _be _is pitying.

(In this instance he’s incorrect. Aziraphale would think him tragic in the true sense of the word: dramatic, beautiful and broken - an inebriated Hamlet - and what he’d _say _would be nothing at all.)

As far as Hell is concerned - because Crowley has reiterated it in reports often enough - Crowley’s lifestyle and fashion choices were a cunning ruse to blend in with Humanity: to better understand their desires and then tempt them to sin and damnation. And they were, broadly speaking.

As far as Crowley’s concerned the choice had a second volume of far more complicated notes: he was always trying to weave together what he liked to wear and what the Angel might like to see. He couldn’t remember when it had started - Mesopotamia perhaps? That was the temptation that he’d always addressed the most time to, despite it never paying off. His hair arranged just so, his doublet, gown or coat impeccably cut. Cloth of the truest black that only princes could afford. Jewellery imposing but not too flashy, suggesting an understated sort of wealth. His hair always styled in the latest fashion, whether in tight Egyptian curls, or bound in a cascade with enough flowers to put Ophelia to shame…

He wonders now whether Aziraphale has a preference for how he wears his hair. (If the Angel does Crowley’s never been able to discern it.) Whisky-soaked thoughts imagine the Angel’s fingers - his nails always so neatly manicured - running through his hair, ghosting across his scalp. Crowley closes his eyes with a bitten off gasp as he imagines the warmth of palms at his neck and shoulders, of the brush of a fingertip as it grazes the edge of his ear, of the drag of fingers carding down through strands of hair, skating over his temples before running down again, pulling gently. It builds a heat in him, half sunlight half lightning, tingling down his nerves. He imagines Aziraphale’s expression, concentrated but soft, an indulgent smile on his lips as he looks at the contrast of colour between his skin and Crowley’s hair, the tresses weaving between his digits, flowing like wine…

Crowley catches up to the fact that his Want has highjacked his imagination without his permission and he is now uncomfortably hard. He sits up with a frustrated noise, looking for the Talisker but all he can see is red. “Nnh?” He wriggles because his jeans are still too tight, trying to pull the offending material into a better position with one hand whilst not understanding why everything is red and he can’t find the damn whisky… It takes a few moments for the blood to stop pounding in between his legs and return to the rest of him, allowing semi-coherent thought to follow. He flings one forearm in front of his face, sweeping aside the blood-red cascade his hair has become. “Ah, _fuck,” _he bitches, reaching for the bottle that’s come into view. He could fix his hair with a snap of his fingers, but what would be the point? He’s pissed and maudlin in his flat and no one can see and no one cares and he has the never-there-memory of Aziraphale’s fingers in his hair and it’s making him shiver every time he thinks of it. He takes a long pull on the Blanton’s - bourbon to burn out the snakebite (haha).

The Sonos, picking up on his mood in the most inadvisable way, abandons the rock legends of the 60s and 70s and flicks to something more recent.

_“Cause I’ll give you all the nails you need_  
_Cover me in gasoline_  
_Wipe away those tears of blood again_  
_And the punch line to the joke is asking…”_

He makes vague and furious gestures at the sound system; his temper’s tightening again. “Stop singing about bloody angels!”

In fear for its existence the Sonos tries again. There’s a hum, almost a melodious wail of voices before drums pick up the pace.

He pauses, the song having brought a stay of execution.

A harmony weaves up, drums, voices and the song rushing together. The void behind the Demon’s sternum feels like it’s coiling itself up into a different spiral and turning deiseil-ways instead of widdershins. It hurts. He staggers clumsily to his knees, bottle in hand that manages not to spill because despite being an inanimate glass object it is still overflowing with dread at the thought of what might befall it if it doesn’t do its best to deliver its alcoholic contents safely down the Demon’s gullet.

“Wise choice, horse head,” Crowley mutters at the Blanton’s bottle. His heart is beating like the drums now and he isn’t certain the feeling will make him wish to unfurl his wings in glory or puke in a bucket.

_“Look who's digging their own grave_  
_That is what they all say_  
_You'll drink yourself to death…”_

Crowley salutes with the bourbon - this is a song he can get behind.

_“Look who makes their own bed_  
_Lies right down within it_  
_And what will you have left?”_

His lips curdle up into a sneer: he doesn’t like this song so much any more but he’s managed to pour three bottles down his throat in record time and has done nothing to negate the affects - has welcomed them in fact - and they are beginning to catch up with him.

_“Standing on the cliff face_  
_Highest foe you'll ever grace_  
_It scares me half to death…”_

“Leave me the fuck alone,” Crowley drawls, his lips uncertain but his tone venomous.

_“Icarus is flying too close to the sun…”_

_Pissssoff, _Crowley thinks incoherently, downing the rest of the bourbon, catching the final drops of oak-charred sweetness on an adroitly forked tongue. _Like you ever knew about it…_

Dimly, Crowley is cognizant - as he always is - that it may not be sensible for an Occult Being who is sneered upon by both Heaven and Hell, to drink himself into obliteration, alone and without defenses.

That will be Future Crowley’s problem. Future Crowley’s life is frequently orchestrated to near ruination and destruction by Past Crowley’s actions. Future Crowley has a lot to say about Past Crowley, much of it bitter and invective and most of it at high volume.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) "The stones are piled on with every word he acknowledges as true, for every day he’s been on earth: Crowley - a demon, incapable of love - loves an angel. And the angel - so full of love for all creation - will never love him back." Yes, I did actually calculate how many days since 21st Oct 4004BC to the date I started writing this, and then multiplied it by 24 for the words of Crowley's realisation. (ffs)
> 
> 2) Throughout most of history, black dye (usually from walnut) was not a colour that held in cloth for longer than a wash or two. If you saw someone wearing pristine black they were certain to be very rich and very influential. 
> 
> 3) The Sonos plays: Castle of Glass by Linkin Park, Dance with the Devil by Breaking Benjamin, Down by Trella, Furious Angels by Rob Dougan, Heaven Help Us by My Chemical Romance, and Icarus by Bastille.
> 
> 3) Blanton’s Single Barrel whiskey has a little pewter racehorse on the stopper which is why Crowley calls it 'horse head'.
> 
> Next chapter is where it all kicks off and everything goes to hell. Well, Crowley does at any rate...


	3. Chapter 3

_“Why aren't you scared of me? Why do you care for me?  
When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”_

Crowley has had too much to drink at this point and his squint is a little off. The song skips on but only to further down the track. He doesn’t like this song, doesn’t like any song he’s decided. He’d rather -

_“Your talk'll be somethin' that shouldn't be said out loud  
Honestly, I thought that I would be dead by now …”_

“Stop it,” he demands, only half awake but wholly unhappy.

_“Bury the hatchet or bury your friend right now…”_

_“No!” _The dregs of the Blanton’s in their faceted glass prison meet the wall with a crash that renders the whole thing nothing but the smallest of whiskey kissed fragments.

_“For the debt I owe, gotta sell my soul  
'Cause I can't say no, no, I can't say no…”_

He closes his eyes for a moment. Opens them again.

_“Bury a friend - I wanna end me…”_

“Stop,” he spits at the Sonos. He’s about to pass out and he doesn’t want silence to be his only companion but the Sonos has been an utter bastard this evening and he wishes he had enough thoughts left to give anyone who owns the bloody thing syphilis. (That would teach them.) He takes a final unsteady swig from a bottle of something that’s in his hand. Tastes like very expensive Burgundy warmed with dark sugar - probably the Warre’s then. He doesn’t recall opening it but it’s here in his fist so he must have. He shouldn’t be wasting the ’45, it’s a bloody good vintage and he’s too wasted to appreciate it - but by extension - he’s too wasted to really care. He tips his head back and then his neck up a little up because somehow he’s utterly sprawled on the floor now and he’s not entirely sure how that happened either.

He uses his left hand to wipe his hair out of his face - why the fuck is it this long? He should just - should - just - _fuck’s sake! _He’s too drunk to snap his fingers around the bottle, too drunk to sober up. To Hell with it, he’ll deal with a five minute hangover in the morning and fix everything after that. It’ll be fine.

He looks at the Warre’s bottle for a moment; it’s half empty but he thinks he could make it full again. A semblance of sense catches up with him: he’s had enough. He wanted his thoughts to shut up, didn’t he? He has his wish. Time to lay down. Crowley reaches out one long arm and swings it to its furthest arc before putting the bottle down. He lays his cheek against one of three large, cream-white sheepskin rugs in the flat that are the only concessions he’s given to the polished black slate floors. He could drag himself to bed but if he’s honest (terrible habit, don’t tell anyone) he’s more likely to miracle himself out of the front window of his flat by mistake before he finds his mattress. And the sheepskin’s not that bad; it’s there and infinitely soft and pale and-

**Feathers - so soft!**

_Not now! _Crowley begs the hole in his chest.

**You could run your fingers through them…**

His hand is moving before he catches it and tightens it into a fist. _No!_

**Would he like it - if you pulled a little like that - in his feathers - in his hair…?**

_Fuck off! Can’t I just lie on something soft without you being a bastard about it?_

The Want has plenty of answers but Crowley isn’t listening. Half-formed and un-banished thoughts are falling away, dissolved into a solution of darkness by all the alcohol he’s drunk.

The Sonos is still playing, but the Demon doesn’t hear it.

_“Take my hand, take my whole life too_  
_ For I can't help falling in love with you…”_

Crowley isn’t cognizant of his eyelids having stuttered closed but they have. At one point he hears the flat singing and can't decide whether he approves or not, but passes out again before he comes to a decision.

* * *

A boot - or possibly a shoe - is kicking him. It’s not violent, at least not yet, but there’s a vicious upturn to its toe that catches on all the sharp points of him, on cheek and chin, on ribs and hips and knees. “Nnhg - the - the fuck - what?” he demands.

_“Forget the many steps to heaven (are you living?)_  
_ It never happened and it ain't so hard (are you living for love?)_  
_ Happiness is a loaded weapon and a short cut is better by far…”_

He wishes the music system would shut up, but, given the circumstances that’s not the worst of Crowley’s problems… He’d very much like to come up into a fighting stance, but he’s half drunk and half hung over, wholly surprised and mostly blinded by his hair so that was never going to be on the cards. The best he can manage is semi-consciousness and twisting onto his belly with his elbows braced: a precursor to getting up - or so he hopes. He’s struggling through the maneuver when the boot? shoe? (it is a shoe and it looks like an Oxford Brogue that’s been melted in shit) slides its toe under his jaw and lifts up with more force than it had preciously.

“Hello Crowley,” says the owner of the shoe in a voice like frogspawn and ancient ashtrays.

Crowley, in a move that would give marshal arts masters pause for thought, slides himself sideways and back so he’s sitting mostly up with his spine to the sofa and his face no longer within such easy reach of Hastur’s shoe. He gives a smile that looks like it doesn’t know whether to commit murder or be violently ill. “Duke Hastur!” The smile curdles as he realizes he doesn’t have his sunglasses. (He could miracle them up but that would show weakness which is not funny at all because he needs them right now to hide his weakness.)

Anyone (save the Almighty who’s omnipotent after all - which raises an awful lot of questions when you think about it - and Crowley has, which was always the start of his problems) who _knows _Crowley - and there are precious few of those - only one really - believe his glasses to be a subterfuge. And they are. But not like that. Crowley is Eden’s Serpent: a shape-shifting Demon amongst mortals. Very rarely a seer or witch may comment on his eyes and he will shrug: they are as used to the preter-and-super-natural as he is. He never needed to hide his eyes from Humanity: it was every other bastard. From Heaven - from Hell - from those who might read the expressions he can’t mask and make him pay. From, for example, the rancid bastard standing in front of him.

He allows his eyes to seep into their serpent’s form - irises fully gold - and gives a little smirk and sigh as he does it as if he’s relaxing. “To what do I owe the…” he should say ‘pleasure’ and almost stumbles before saying “Vissitation?” making his tongue sound whisky-soaked instead of terrified.

Hastur looks annoyed which is not a great look to observe on an Archduke of Hell. (Not that any expression on an Archduke of Hell is really a good one, by definition.) Hastur doesn’t like anyone but he especially doesn’t like Crowley. That little snot-wipe obliterated Ligur. Ligur wasn’t someone Hastur liked but he was someone he was very used to hating tolerably over a very long time and he didn’t appreciate that being taken away from him by this swanky little shite who thought he was somehow above the rules of Hell just because he got to swan around the fetid shit-swamp that Humanity infested. It made him sick. Then again most Earthly things did, it was the lack of sulfur and screaming - it just did something to his sinuses.

Hastur isn’t pleased that Crowley - smart arsed bastard - has gone from face-planting the floor to sitting up and looking like… like… He doesn’t have an equivalent to call to mind, but what he really hates is the fact that he knows if Humans saw Crowley right now, they’d equate him with someone famous - someone - a - a … (The two terms Hastur is reaching for and failing to grasp are ‘rock star’ and ‘serial killer’. Only one of these aesthetics or pastimes has ever appealed to Crowley. Hastur would be very, very, disappointed to learn which.)

“You’re wanted. Down below.”

For a nano-second some self-destructive bit of Crowley considers waggling his eyebrows - making it A Thing. Self preservation gets the better of him. “The expense accounts are in the post…”

“This isn’t about expenses…”

Crowley gets a very sick and sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach: he’s still mostly drunk and getting more hung over by the second and wishes he’d thought to deal with both before Hell invaded his flat. He swallows queasily but masks it by giving an unconcerned sniff and tilting his head to the side. “What is it then?” his tone - somehow, thank fuck - sounds bored.

“Himself wants a word.” Hastur smiles as he says it, teeth yellow, lips cracking and weeping black ichor at the edges.

Crowley is perfectly still for five whole seconds before he forces one eyebrow and his lips to cant up in amused enquiry. “And that would be…?”

Hastur takes a drooping roll-up that has not fared well from its time behind his ear and places it ponderously between his lips before cupping his hands to light it. “Lucifer.”

Something primal cowers at the back of Crowley’s skull, remembering how it had felt at Lucifer’s approach in Tadfield, how it had forced him not just to his knees but flat upon the tarmac with pain and dread. _Unholy mother of twelve bastards, _he thinks whilst somehow dredging up a wider smile. “Lunchtime suit him? I’m free at two…”

Hastur pulls something from under his trenchcoat. He steps forward as he swings the crowbar like a pro tee’ing off on the green in front of presidents.

Crowley sees it coming out of the corner of one eye, but his drunken bullshit has been just that: drunken bullshit, and he doesn’t even have time to twitch. For the briefest moment as the flat of the crowbar cracks into the side of his skull, Anthony J Cowley regrets that last bottle of whiskey.

The Sonos is still playing quietly. Neither of the Demons mark it; Hastur because he doesn’t notice such things and Crowley because he’s unconscious with blood gently trickling from his skull.

_“Yes and they will run you down, down 'til you fall_  
_ And they will run you down, down 'til you go_  
_ Yeah, so you can't crawl no more_  
_And way down we go…”_

* * *

In Human lore, Erebus is either a titian who is the personification of darkness and the abyss, or alternatively it is a realm of purification where one’s sins are burnt away in a lake of molten silver.

Demons know better.

Hell’s geography is complicated, but that is to be expected of a place which is simultaneously several cities separated by rivers, consecutive rings or planes arranged like the layers of an onion, the basement and underground floors of a corporate office building, and a series of pits, voids and chasms - most of which have very unpleasant things at the bottom. Erebus is not an abyss, it is The Abyss. And as far as anyone can tell it is endless - not that there have been a plethora of volunteers keen on finding out.

Crowley fears he is about to become the newest reluctant recruit.

Erebus is the name of the Abyss itself: the rock masses to either side are called Shame and Scar. There is a vast bridge made of the bones of a long dead leviathan that spans Erebus and allows Demons to travel between Dis (the city on Shame) and Agrace (the monstrous keep on Scar). The bridge is called the Bone Bridge because Demons aren’t all that imaginative when it comes down to it, and it seemed pointless to call it something fancier like ‘Azathoth’s Ninth Watch’ when everyone would end up calling it the Bone Bridge anyway.

* * *

_Oh fuck me, Malphas is huge... _That is neither lewdness nor cleverness on Crowley’s behalf. (In fact in his current state he doesn’t feel up to being either lewd or clever, which is a pity as those are two of his most favourite things to be.)

Crowley has woken up with not only a whisky _and_ a whiskey hangover but also a crowbar one too, somewhere in the deepest bowels of Hell. It’s not any bit of Hell he immediately recognizes, but he’s spent as little time as possible here over the last six millennia so that’s not really surprising.

His eyes pry themselves reluctantly open: reluctant because he doesn’t want to know what sort of trouble he’s in and open because it’s a matter of survival to know what sort of trouble he’s in. He gives an experimental wriggle, trying to work out what’s going on.

Hastur, with the same (or another? hard to tell) flammable stick of nothing but nicotine dripping from his cadmium grin, asks, “Trouble getting up? Sloth is it?” The crowbar is still resting up on the shoulder of his grimy trench coat.

Toad-headed malice incarnate is not who Crowley wants to see, especially when his hands are bound and he’s on his back and fuck knows where he is in Hell and he doesn’t even have his sunglasses. “My bed holds me hostage,” he says flatly, because even given all his disadvantages he’s still Crowley. He blinks and tries to concentrate on where he is and on what might happen. Hastur had mentioned Lucifer (who patently so far isn’t in this little gathering) and Crowley can’t work out whether that’s bad or worse.

He twists his head to the side - his hair falls in his eyes - but it can’t cover the gloss-smooth texture by his cheek nor the ancient calcium and marrow petrifaction smell, like earth and bad breath. Well. That solves the issue of where he is: the Bone Bridge. He tries to sit up and is surprised when no one stops him. His wings unfurl as soft as a sigh; he’s not donning armour, it’s more like shrugging on a jacket - a really damn stylish one at that. Crowley finds his personal sense of style comforting and he's very short on comfort right now.

In front of him are two Demons: Duke Hastur and Prince Malphas.

Crowley cracks a grin he thinks might split his face. “To what do I owe the honour?” His hands are tied, his wings are spread in foolishness or arrogance and he’s on a bridge: certain… extrapolations suggest themselves. He looks around himself, past Hastur, past Malphas. In this little cabal there’s also Legion, or nine of them anyway, all with identical hair styled up into horns and long spider-leg eyelashes. Legion, depending on your opinion, is either one Demon with endless forms, or many identical Demons of the lowest rank who have a hive mind. Either way Hell treats them as expendable foot soldiers, expendable muscle - just expendable really.

Crowley always hated it when the Lords of Hell decided to come on a jaunt to Earth with another one of their brilliant plans. Usually fear of what might be happening Down Below whilst they are away keeps them pinned to their desks but, every now and then, they went to show how a Real Demon Does This Sort Of Thing - to make some point. He shudders as he remembers the utter unspeakable shitstorm that resulted from Gomorrah: there are rules and, if you break them, stuff like Holy Wrath happens. He’s not a fan of Holy Wrath. The hangover - the crowbar one especially - isn’t helping but he thinks Malphas might have had something to do with Gomorrah. Bloody Hell. This is all starting to bode very ill.

“Um, hi,” he tries because no one has done anything terrible to him yet. “It… um…” Crowley really wants to throw up - Hell is not somewhere you want to be with a hangover (crowbar, alcohol induced, or otherwise). “You, uh,” he swallows down bile and manages to make it look nonchalant although he doesn’t know how long he can keep this up for. “What’s up?” he manages and winces at his own words. It is lucky for him that no one else in Hell has spent enough time on Earth to either equate the phrase with California in the late 80s or an irritating cartoon rabbit from 1940.

_Fuck fuck fuck - I’m losing it and they haven’t even done anything yet. Shit, _Crowley thinks miserably.

Malphas takes a grimy tobacco pouch from the pocket of their coat: the coat had once been a rather fine blue brocade, but it hadn’t been washed since 1712 - and that had only been by mistake. They stick their tongue out of the corner of their beaky mouth in concentration as they roll the cigarette.

Crowley has to resist the urge to cringe. If Malphas is going to draw this out over a smoke, and Hastur hasn’t complained, that means they’re really pleased with themselves. Which in turn is bad news for Crowley.

They light the cigarette and take the first drag, the thing at the back of their head gives a little wriggle of pleasure. Crowley doesn’t know what the thing attached to the other Demon’s head is; going on looks alone it’s either some sort of half rotted cephalopod or a breed of sentient cancer.

Crowley is aware, because he’s hung out with a lot of lowly sorts: artists and prostitutes, musicians, actors and visionaries mostly, that this is A Scene. He can almost hear the music in his head if it was an opera. Even better, he can imagine how Salvator Rosa would paint it: he’s center left where the light is and Hastur and Malphas are in the dimming shadows behind and to the side. But the real contrast is between what little illumination there is and the glossy black of Crowley’s wings: the light kicks up from the polished edges of the Bone Bridge and then falls away to nothing once it touches the depths.

The breath of wind from Erebus is a quiet but constant howl, dry and dusty, smelling of soot and despair.

“’Spose you’re gonna throw me off, yeah?”

“Oh yes.”

“Damned to fall forever...” It would be incredibly dull, Crowley reasons. Unless there are nets of razor wire strung across. In which case many small pieces of him will be extremely bored… Crowley starts to wonder what else might be down in Erebus’s maw. His mouth goes dry: sometimes, having an imagination is a bad thing.

Hastur smiles, and as with all his smiles it’s about as welcome and reassuring as a brightly coloured drinking straw in a bleach and mercury milkshake. “Eventually. We’re going to have a little fun first.”

Crowley wants to run a hand through his hair to show how little he cares but there are two fundamental problems with this. Firstly, his hands are bound. And secondly, he cares a lot.

“This is for your rehabilitation, Crowley,” Malphas informs him. “You are being given a chance to recant.”

“Recant?” His voice sounds small of a sudden.

“His Satanic Majesty, Lucifer himself, has decreed it. He feels you have… misspent your time and misplaced your loyalties on Earth. He blames himself for not keeping closer watch. But in light of your longstanding service, he believes it is only fair that you not be cast aside but rather welcomed back into the fold. Once you’ve learnt the error of your ways of course.”

“If - if - I mean, I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes. What happens if I don’t?”

“Oh I hope you don’t,” Hastur says quickly.

“You will be asked upon every third day for the next six thousand years to renounce your treachery against Hell and His Most Infernal Majesty.”

Crowley wonders if that’s a Union Thing but gives a sharpe-toothed sort of sneer and manages not to ask.

“Once you have renounced your crimes you will be reassigned to take your rightful place amongst the Hellspawn, here, for eternity. Somewhere in Tartarus - Dagon has the details. If you have not repented in six thousand years, Lucifer will consider your crimes expunged. If you’re in a fit state you will be allowed back on Earth to return to your original duties.”

Hastur gives a scathing snort showing how likely he thinks that will be.

“Er. An’ - and if I’m not in a fit state?”

“You will be thrown into Erebus, fated to fall in perpetuity. Hastur has requested to be the one to throw you off.”

“You think you’re smart, don’t you, pretty boy? Think you’re smart and clever and stubborn. I hope you are,” Hastur leers, his eyes burning with odium. “I’m looking forward to seeing the state of you in six millennia when you’re just begging for Holy Water. Then I can’t wait to wave goodbye with a gob of spit as I fling you over the side one final time.”

Crowley leans back a little as Hastur leans in and he hopes he manages some sort of obnoxiously indifferent look but he wouldn’t lay odds on it. The fact that Hastur, crowbar still in hand, hasn’t done anything to him yet is getting more terrifying by the minute. He makes certain his voice is as close to its usual purr as he can make it. “Six thousand years? Alright.” He gives a liquid shrug of shoulders and wings that’s frankly insulting.

A damned soul cannot be destroyed in Hell. A Demon can, but only by Holy Water, a Sanctified Relic, or an Angel of the Host. Crowley knows that whatever is coming he’ll survive it. (Whether he wants to will be a question for later. Crowley always has been good at prioritizing.)

Malphas slowly turns: they look like a half-rotted humanoid raven with a cigarette in their beak and an undead octopus attached to the back of their head. They loom over both Crowley and Hastur - they're a Prince - they can loom over everything save Lucifer. “Is this your choice?”

Crowley is aware that it’s Hell - there is no good choice by definition. But Hastur is standing right there and expecting him to bow, to cower and break. For a moment, he allows himself to imagine giving in. Repenting and working in Tartarus for eternity. He knows, in a sudden flash of gnosis that fills every cell of his body, what will happen if he does. The storm of Want in his chest will send him mad and little by little he will be forced to fill it with something else: with blood and misery not his own. He sees it for a moment, this other Crowley he could become. His eyes widen and his grin does something horrible before he chokes it down. _“Did I fucking stutter?” _he says in a voice stripped of its customary bluster.

Hastur smiles, the expression blossoming across his face like a plague.

Malphas waves their hand. Legion are all standing ready: they wear heavy black leather duelling gloves that haven’t been seen since the sword schools of the Renaissance. But unlike any school they wear them on both hands. And instead of a blade, buckler or cloak or anything any fencing school would use, they each hold a butcher’s hook the length of their palm - of the type that are sturdy enough to hang a side of beef.

Crowley sees them, sees the glint of silver and the elegant curves. “What - you - I thought you…”

“He has chosen,” Malphas decrees.

“You - No! _Not _my wings!” The words melt into cries, some bitten back some given full voice as the hooks - six in all - are rammed through Crowley’s wings, shoulders and ribs. Each hook is forced deep to clasp around a bone and curl out the other side: they burn like blessed silver because that’s exactly what they are.

Spitting, cursing and writhing, Crowley tries to see what the other end of the hooks are attached to. He has a brief glimpse of giant reels of silver above the bridge on - spindles? pulleys? - he doesn’t know and has no time to find out because - “Ah bloody _fuck,” _Crowley manages brokenly before Hastor grabs him and pitches him over the side of the Bone Bridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Cowley's Sonos plays: Bury a Friend by Billie Eilish, Can't Help Falling in Love (dark version) by Tommee Profitt, Under the Gun by Sisters of Mercy, and Way Down We Go by Kaleo.
> 
> 2) I went to an exhibition of Salvator Rosa - it was all bandits and witches and demons and odd landscapes. (Which was highly entertaining.) But the best pictures were a handful of life-size portraits: one's a self portrait I can't seem to find, and the other was 'poetry'. The internet pics don't do her justice - his use of light made it look like a model in a photo shoot who was about to stalk off to get a drink. This is one of the better pics I could find that gives some idea of the depth of light - https://images.app.goo.gl/MKChrz4StoZDP8wX7


	4. Chapter 4

‘Fuck you’ is easy to say. You can say it, growl it, gasp it, spit it, choke it, and still mean it. But no matter your resolve, it’s impossible to keep up. There’s always a finite point: there’s a moment when you don’t have anything more to give. Sometimes it’s strength, sometimes it’s pain, sometimes it’s hope. In the end it doesn’t matter.

This is the problem: you fall, you fall, you fall, and you fall and you’re still falling with hooks lodged in your ribs - in your wings - your shoulders - and you’re fucked. And you’re a Demon - you’re used to pain - the only questions worth asking is how bad and how long? And he’s asked those sort of questions before and the results are startlingly similar. He calculates - because what else can he do? - the number of days in six millennia and divides them by three so he can tally each ordeal, so he knows it won’t be endless.

He thinks of the ache of six thousand years, of the void inside his breast, the black hole beneath his sternum, crushing his thoughts and feelings like galaxies beneath the gravity of its selfish desire. He thinks of the splinter in his heart like a crucifixion nail. He thinks of all that he lost and all that he can never have. He thinks of the six hooks, shining blessed silver, through his ribs, his shoulders, his wings…

And Anthony J Crowley starts to laugh.

It is not by any stretch of the imagination a nice laugh, nor does it sound remotely sane as it rises through the chasm depths, distorting as it echoes back and forth between the rocks of Shame and Scar.

By the time it reaches the Bone Bridge, it’s no more that a whisper on the breath of Erebus, but the Demons on the walkway who hear it all shudder and hurry to cross faster.

* * *

He had drifted into a fugue state, neither conscious nor unconscious, barely able to string thoughts together, falling and falling and falling, with agony as his constant companion, twined round him like an unwanted lover. His head is forced back with the force of the rushing wind. The warm air whistles past his ears, joining with the rattle-clink of the chains as they drop him into the depths, link by silver link.

The end, when it comes, is brutal and the shock of it tears a scream from his throat. The scream doesn’t last as long as the fall, but it does last until his voice finally gives out.

He hangs in the darkness of Erebus, silver hooks burning in his flesh, coiled around his bones.

He doesn’t know how long he hangs there; he could look at his watch: he has perfect night vision and it displays multiple time zones; London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo. It displays the time in Hell too, but that time is always Too Late, and Crowley has never felt that so keenly as he does now. All in all it doesn’t seem worth the effort. He thinks on time instead, tries to picture the shape of it as he feels it marching slowly along his nerves, nanosecond by nanosecond in icepick boots. _Time is very slow, _he decides. _And a bastard. Whose idea was it to invent time anyway?_

Perhaps if he snaps his fingers he can miracle it away… Ah, no - he can only stop time, can’t he? Ironic. _Whose fault is irony again? Oh. Mine, _he thinks.

“Fuck,” Crowley mumbles through a mouthful of blood.

* * *

Some time later, there is a shiver down the chains, a vibration from on high like a plucked strand on a spider’s web. And like a spider he can feel it, but the vibrations he receives are not gentle hums of information through the tips of his toes (do spiders have toes?) but the grinding twist of blessed silver through his body. And then with a lurch the chains begin to wind back, hefting him upwards, link by link. The pain whites out his mind: a lightning flash of agony that short-circuits every thought he’s ever had. It takes Crowley a long time to realize the inhuman scream he can hear is his own.

* * *

He’s a bloody and delirious mess when the haul him up over the parapet of the Bone Bridge. They wrench the hooks out of him and he makes strangled noises between a cough and a sob each time the metal finally leaves his flesh. He retches and spits a mouthful or two of blood: it stains his cheek and catches in his hair. Now the silver is no longer touching him his body seeks to heal, fractured bone and torn muscle knitting back together, lungs closing, skin reforming; it seems to take forever. Crowley lies on the walkway of the bridge gulping in small, unsteady breaths.

A boot nudges him in the ribs, not especially hard, just enough to get his attention. “You recant?”

There is a comic Crowley read once about an immortal called Lazarus who hung out in bars and took a lot of drugs. The plot was pure chaos and the artwork brash and striking: Crowley had liked it enormously. On one memorable occasion, the protagonist had ground out, 'You _what?_ Do yourself a favour, you tragic-looking old pisspot - go someplace and eat a lightbulb.'

"Do you recant?"

"G-go eat a lightbulb," Crowley manages. His voice isn’t as steady as he’d like but he’s formed words - technically an entire sentence - so is feeling quite pleased with himself. _Fuck it, _he thinks, _only seven hundred thirty thousand four hundred and eighty five left to go._

He feels a lot less smug when they stab the hooks through his ankles and upper thighs and throw him off the parapet again.

* * *

Aziraphale doesn’t know whether to be annoyed or concerned, two feelings that often go hand in hand when he deals with Crowley. He’s upset too, which is a new ingredient in the mix - for a Demon Crowley is surprisingly un-upsetting. But the Demon in question has missed their Ritz evening twice in a row. He hasn’t called nor been round to the bookshop since the Friday before last and the Angel is hurt by the snub. Of course it’s possible he’s overslept, but Crowley’s always more prone to that in centuries he dislikes, and as far as Aziraphale can tell Crowley is a big fan of the 21stcentury: it’s fast and stylish and inventive and troubling - rather like him.

Aziraphale decides that giving the Demon the benefit of the doubt is the correctly Angelic thing to do: he’ll ring Crowley’s flat and his mobile telephone and see if he has an excuse and apology to offer.

The phone in the flat rings four times and the answer machine clicks on. “Hi this is Anthony Crowley - you know what to do...” Aziraphale certainly does: he hangs up. Next he tries the mobile telephone. It rings for longer before switching over to an automated voice recording service that Crowley hasn’t bothered to personalize with instructions to do things stylishly. Disconcerted, Aziraphale hangs up. He frets for a few moments before finally dialling the flat again.

“Hi, this is Anthony Crowley…”

“No, it’s your blasted machine…”

“You know what to do - do it with style.”

“I do everything with style,” he complains, “I’m Aetherial! Oh - ah, well never mind that now. I mean to say, er, hello. It's me - Aziraphale. It’s Wednesday. You, ah, you missed dinner. At the Ritz. Again. I hope you’re all right, only you’ve been awfully quiet, and you didn’t answer your other telephone - the little black - the - the pocket one. I’ve not offended you, have I? You always answer the pocket one. I’m, I mean, I’m terribly sorry if I have dear boy - offended you that is… And I was wondering if you fancied dinner on Saturday? We could go to the French House - or that noisy artists’ club you like on Dean Street. Anyway, do let me know about… Saturday and, ah, things. Right. See you soon, I hope.” Chore complete, Aziraphale replaces the Bakelite receiver in its cradle and the old phone acknowledges it with a quiet ‘ting’.

He had hoped that leaving a message for the Demon would quiet the nagging sense of unease he feels fluttering in his stomach like a swarm of rogue moths. It hasn’t. “Dratted serpent,” he curses to the empty bookshop. “Honestly Crawly - _Crowley - _you’re, you’re…” he searches his considerable lexicon for the rudest thing he can think to say. “You’re no better than a bratty hosepipe!” The insult makes him feel both a little better and a little guilty at the same time. He smoothes his hands down the front of his waistcoat. “Cocoa, I think,” he decides. “And some poetry perhaps. I do believe I’m in the mood for Eliot…”

Aziraphale sits at ease in his desk chair, his legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. A still-hot mug of cocoa sits on his desk blotter. In his hands is a hardback first edition of T. S. Eliot's _Poems: 1909–1925._

_“Is it like this_  
_ In death's other kingdom _  
_ Waking alone_  
_ At the hour when we are_  
_ Trembling with tenderness_  
_ Lips that would kiss_  
_ Form prayers to broken stone. _  
_ The eyes are not here_  
_ There are no eyes here_  
_ In this valley of dying stars_  
_ In this hollow valley_  
_ This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms,” _the Angel reads quietly to himself.

* * *

Crowley had expected, or hoped at least, that the pain would become monotonous; in his experience dull things are easier to ignore and he very much wishes he could ignore what is happening to him. But, Crowley realizes, pain comes in different colours: agony has in fact an entire artist’s palette at its disposal.

The first is a sickening, roiling tempest-green edged in arsenic as he falls, the chains streaming behind him, unraveling blessing-bright in the darkness even as their holiness poisons him.

Next comes an explosion of a colour he can’t name as the chains reach their limit and snap taught. It’s a colour only to be found in nebulas and delirium: vivid yellow and turquois both at once.

The turquois fades first and slowly the yellow darkens becoming the dragging red agony of suspension. It throbs through different hues with his heartbeat: vermilion, crimson, scarlet, claret; alizarin, maroon, burgundy, carmine; ruby, garnet, berry, brick.

It’s a relief of sorts when the red deepens into the dusky, bruised-purple hues of semi-consciousness, dimming Crowley’s senses as his body shuts down.

But there is one realization that doesn’t diminish. No matter how many times he runs this brutal gauntlet of colours, he’ll never reach the blissful surcease that black represents. Instead a searing electric white jolts him back to his senses as the chains reel him up.

The ascent stutters between that blinding white and the swirling silver-grey of delirium where nothing holds meaning and he forgets who he is. At last he is hauled back over the parapet of the Bone Bridge and the hooks are wrenched out as he lies on the walkway, twitching and shuddering, his senses realigning and his body struggling to heal.

Then comes the question: “Do you recant?”

Crowley’s responses vary. Sometimes he manages to scrape up a little defiance, sometimes it’s all he can do to force the negative from his lips. Sometimes he doesn't even make sense. He’s made the descent into Erebus twenty-three times now. (Only seven hundred thirty thousand four hundred and sixty three left to go.)

#2 “An’ give you… th’ sssatisfaction?”  
#3 “Not… in sssix thoussan’ yearss.”  
#4 “G-grave an' weasles.”  
#5 “Haahaahaaahaa!”  
#6 “Now there'll be violence..."  
#7 “F-fuck you.”  
#8 “N-not likely.”  
#9 _“Cunt.”_  
#10 “…..no.”  
#11 “Not... thiss again."  
#12 “Heave ho...”  
#13 “Icarusss..."  
#14 “Nn... wanker."  
#15 “Pissssoff.”  
#16 “Le's go aga'n..."  
#17 “…"  
#18 (He has no idea what he said.)  
#19 “Brutal."  
#20 “Nnhhg...”  
#21 “nn… n… nn…”

On the twenty-second time he wearily raises his head and spits a dark glob of blood at Malphas’s feet. This time he simply reaches out a hand and claws himself a few inches closer to the parapet.

* * *

There is a… thing in Aziraphale’s shop.

Different types of people walk through the door of the Angel’s shop. Some are seeking shelter from the London rain. Some are students, hopeful and yet too lazy to walk to Foyle’s or Hatchards. Others are mistaken as to what sort of bookshop it is (it is Soho after all). One or two - to Aziraphale’s great distress - know exactly what sort of books he stocks and actually want to purchase one.

The only other type of person who walks in is a singular sort - very singular in fact - so singular that there is only one of him: a vexing, lanky presence in dark clothes and sunglasses who has a tendency to invite the Angel out to lunch. That individual hasn’t darkened his doorstep in two months which Aziraphale finds both rude and upsetting.

For a moment, as the bell above the door jangles, he thinks it’s Crowley. “Well, I must say,” he begins in his huffiest tone of voice, before he turns and sees who it is (or, more importantly, who it isn’t.) “Oh,” he says. “What do _you _want?” Now Aziraphale is paying attention he doesn’t know how he ever mistook this thing or its aura for Crowley. It smells like Thames mud and meat on the turn.

“Nice gaff you got here.” It’s short and grubby and wearing an Edwardian tweed coat with patches at the elbows of the type Oxbridge Dons used to wear. It has a bowler hat at an unfortunate angle that looks to have been milled from a skinned badger. There’s something under its hat and Aziraphale is very grateful he can’t see what it is. Wasps circle it lazily.

(Aziraphale cannot in good conscience consider it a ‘them’. It is rank and lowly: things are moving under the tweed coat and he is so thoroughly repulsed he would rather address the Ebola virus as ‘good sir-and-or-madam’ than call this walking abattoir ‘them’.)

“I am an Angel of Eden, Aziraphale, Principality of…”

“Eh. Know that.” It sniffs - a hearty and truly revolting sound. “I’m - whatsitt. ‘Is replacement.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Crawly. In the sunglasses. Y’know.”

Aziraphale tugs fastidiously at his cuffs. “I am aware of his existence.”

“’E got recalled.”

He stills in an instant. “R-recalled?”

“Yeah. I’m Screwtape.” Something chitinous that looks to have a lot of legs can briefly be seen moving beneath the opening of the tweed jacket. “I’m ‘is replacement.”

“I see,” Aziraphale says as icily as he can. “Is this to be a permanent state of affairs?”

Screwtape laughs: its amusement sounds like flies on viscera. “Should say! ‘E’s fucked.” It grins wide and wasps fly and wriggle between the points of its teeth. “Gone chucked ‘im into Erebus. ‘E’s not gettin’ out - ‘e’ll be doolally when ‘e does.”

“How… fascinating,” the Angel murmurs tightly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Spread the good news. Thought you might appreciate it.”

“Indeed. And give me one good reason,” Aziraphale’s aura brightens at the edges becoming something diamond-white and just as sharp, “why I shouldn’t smite you…”

“Oi - oi, no need f’that!” It takes a hasty step backwards. In its true form, Screwtape is a chaotic mass of bright green centipedes: it has the intelligence of a ball of centipedes too. “Just thought…” It no longer remembers what it had thought - it’s terrified. The Angel has gone from a dowdy man-shaped thing in fawn and cream to a blazing halo of light and wings every edge of which is star-forged. “Thought it would be cushy!” it gabbles. “Up here...” It starts to lose its form in its panic. “They was always sayin’ he was a useless wanker…”

“Be silent!” Aziraphale commands. “And sit!”

The centipedes collapse.

The Angel glares at the horrible mess of insects and slurry that twine unhappily round and around its bowler hat.

Screwtape never imagined being posted on Earth could be this difficult. It’s starting to regret having signed up for the job.

“You will tell me exactly what befell the Demon Crowley,” the Angel says in a voice filled with terrible harmonies, “or I will make you wish the Almighty had never created you…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Screwtape is of course from the Screwtape Letters by C S Lewis. In the original book, Screwtape is a senior demon giving advice to his nephew; he has a tendency to turn into a giant centipede when angry. In this story he is only a very minor demon who can barely be anything but a centipede for longer than ten minutes.
> 
> The comic book Crowley is recalling is Lazarus Churchyard by Warren Ellis. It contains the immortal line, "My advantageous mongoose masturbates with abandon over your mother's skeleton," and is responsible for some of the odder things he says when asked to recant.


	5. Chapter 5

He’s falling: he always is. When the hooks are in his arms or in his legs he can try - if he has the strength - to open his wings to slow his fall. (There’s nothing to be done when the hooks are set around his spine other than scream.) This time the hooks are in his wings, shoulders and ribs again, which means sometimes an air current will catch him wrong and send him pin wheeling, at the mercy of his ragged flight feathers and the cant of the chains. Agony paints the darkness tempest-green with bursts of arsenic as he spins, trying to fold his wings to correct his course. He falls faster, still tumbling.

_Fuck. _

With a cry he opens his wings as far as he can against the bone deep burn of the hooks. The pain is exquisite and pulses with every colour at once including - almost, for a moment - sable. He pushes into the black, embraces it, but it’s smoke-like and ephemeral; it’s not his to keep.

When the purple dusk lightens, he can see a different colour: there is a tiny brightness somewhere far above him. It looks like a star… He wonders incoherently if he’s gone mad and can now see the white-gold snap of pain heading towards him for when the chains reach their end. The star does seem to be getting bigger… He watches it and his beleaguered senses decide that he is obviously falling the other way up and his pain is coming to greet him. He doesn’t know what else it can be, because there are no stars in Erebus, only him, and an endless abyss of hurt.

* * *

Aziraphale folds his wings in as close as he can, angling them like a bird of prey, willing himself to dive faster, to become a bullet, a missile, an arrow - anything that will gain greater speed. He wishes to be a meteorite in a planet’s gravity well. He needs to fall - faster - faster - faster than the chains he can see snaking up out of the Abyss, faster than physics, faster than light. He needs to breach the event horizon of a black hole - he needs - he needs… he _needs_…

* * *

The star-shine is brighter now, forcing Crowley’s eyes closed again; he’s become accustomed to darkness and the colours of pain. He tries to turn his head but the updraft has his chin pinned back. He can’t tell what is coming for him but he knows it will end him - no one would come for him otherwise. He finds it funny that both Heaven and Hell are taking such an interest. (Tempt Humans into Original Sin? - fine. Fraternize with an Angel? - whatever. Avert the Apocalypse? - hmm - about that…)

But it gives him hope and a rictus smile starts to stretch across his cracked and bloody lips. _“Yesss…” _Lambent serpentine eyes open, blink, and - _Fucking smite me, _he thinks, the most coherent thought he’s had in forever.

_Fuck’s sake - do it. _ _Do it!_

_Please._

* * *

Across the millennia Aziraphale has been quick to accuse Crowley or the influences of Hell for the atrocities visited upon Earth. He has, to his credit, believed the Demon when the accusations were refuted.

Crowley assumed that Angels could sense truth as an inherent ability. They can’t; Aziraphale had just been struck by Crowley’s look of quickly masked pain like someone trying to hold a hand against a wound and then his sneer that was part anger, part disgust and still had that ghost of hurt he was trying to hide.

At the start he’d professed, “I didn’t do it!” and Aziraphale had never believed him, despite the ache in his expression. But a few centuries on he had a tendency to snap, “It wasn’t _me!”_\- as if he knew it should have been and was relieved that it wasn’t.

They never really talked about it. The nearest they’d come was in a tavern in what would, one day, be called Spain. Crowley had been catatonically drunk for a month straight and the queasy feeling of his aura had started to get on the Angel’s nerves - he could sense it all the way from Florence. So Aziraphale had tracked him down and demanded to know what on Earth was going on.

He’d tried to explain about the… devices… the questions… and the commendation he’d received… And then had mostly broken down because the righteousness of it reminded him of Heaven and the cruelty of it Hell, and he’d always thought both bloody unbearable. To find them here, on Earth, tied up together with a perfectly virtuous blood-stained ribbon made him sick - had actually made him sick several times in fact (although that might have been the tavern wine too.)

Aziraphale had been merciless as only an Angel could and told him it had been his own fault for doing something so monstrous and how dare he pity himself now? He was Fallen - he was a Demon - he’d made his decision aeons ago and could jolly well live with it…

Crowley had sunk into himself, curling like a dying leaf in autumn to the extent where the Angel expected his hair to dull to chestnut, umber, ash. After a moment he’d stood, unsteady but grim, leaning on the table for support. “Righty-right,” he’d mumbled, untangled his legs from the bench and staggered outside without looking at the Angel once.

The word for ‘depressed’ had yet to be coined but thanks to the potter’s industry and ceramics in general there were several words in differing languages that meant ‘flawed’ or ‘kiln broke’ or even ‘not worth the fire’. All could, in that moment, be applied to Crowley. Aziraphale’s heart had twisted and - that feeling _cannot _be compassion - well it might be - aren’t Angels meant to feel compassion? (For Humanity! Because they’re made from Her Grace but flawed - no, well, freed? no! given - ah! - _gifted _\- Free Will.) Yes. Right. So why should a Demon be so miserable at the prospects of Humanity’s downfall to perdition? And if that _was _the case, why should a Principality even care?

Uncomfortable with his feelings and unanswerable questions trooping behind them, the Angel thought it best to hunt down the Serpent of Eden straight away. To confront him. As adversaries ought. Five paces into the little courtyard that held two majestic citrus trees either side of a well, he found his quarry.

He was kneeling, drooped in the dust, breathing shallow and sharp, swaying unsteadily. His head was bowed, his skin pale and his eyes a half-lidded rancid butter yellow instead of their usual warm amber.

“Crowley?”

He flinched back - almost falling - then flung himself forward to counterbalance it and ended with his hands in the dust too. He gave the Angel a very sorry and particular smile as if he knew this was where all creation willed him to be: on hands and knees in the dirt. “Why? In _Her _name? … H-how…?” he asked faintly, his eyes still sharp-yellow with horror. “How could they… do that?”

And that was when the Angel realized that Crowley hadn’t been responsible for the Spanish Inquisition after all, at about the same time the Demon decided he didn’t care if someone smote him, it would be far easier to deal with than the memories and the hangover, so keeled over in a stupor.

The Principality of the Eastern Gate had gazed upon the Demon for the time it took the sky to blush orange-pink and then lilac and onwards towards the darkening shades of night. The more he looked the more he thought how thin the Demon was and how there was still the innermost corner of one brow knifing down into unhappiness, even in unconsciousness. And somehow, without his consent, those two things melted together into ‘fragility’. And without knowing exactly what he was doing - other than it was the only thing to do - Aziraphale had carefully lifted his adversary, carried him, and placed him within a room at the nearest inn. He paid the innkeeper a month’s rent before he left, just in case. He knew Crowley liked to sleep - slothful, indolent thing.

He walked out of Toledo, heading on the dusty road to Salamanca and his conscience was clear. _Crystal_. But instead of the blessings he had to do in Avila all he could see in his mind was the memory of a slender, pale body - too pale really - and too pointy, all hips and angles - swathed in the black of the night sky with blood red tresses like a fiery crown...

And Aziraphale’s heart did something strange - expanded and contracted at once in one vast, overwhelming beat. He told himself it was because he hadn’t smote the Demon when he ought and also that mercy was holy. That was why his heart reacted so: a conflict of orders. He’d smite the Demon next time.

His heart pulsed uncomfortably.

Next time. Or… No. Next time.

And then the… conflict… would be resolved.

* * *

The white light - not the white of pain, it’s somehow brighter and softer at the same time - plummets past him. “No!” he cries, or he thinks he does, but his throat is too ravaged and in truth he makes no sound at all. Blood drips from his mouth.

* * *

Aziraphale has never been an alchemist or a student of natural philosophy, and his usual reading material isn’t scientifically based. But despite Crowley’s occasional complaints, he is extremely intelligent. He is an Angel, after all. Even so, he doubts and doubts again. It’s Erebus, he realizes: the darkness that questions, the darkness that stares back, the Abyss that never ends, the void that tears you apart. But he is an Angel, a creature spun of Hope and Light made to bring the message of the Almighty’s love to those lost in the dark. And who could be more lost than Crowley?

* * *

The star dives past Crowley and there’s a scream he can’t voice burning in his throat without him even really knowing why. It was light and it was hope and he’d dared think it was for him - _Fucking idiot _\- and the loss rips through him deeper than the hooks.

The star doesn't vanish, it rises from the darkness - although now Crowley thinks it looks like a bird, which is ridiculous. A star fell and it’s coming back as a bird? Well, that’s just stupid. His delirium is usually more inventive than this...

Time stutters, and every second is agony.

_Highest foe you’ll ever grace, _he thinks, and wonders if he has it in him to laugh again.

The star bursts beneath him without warning and he cannons into it.

Arms grasp him, curl round him, lift him.

He doesn’t understand the colours any more and doesn’t know if he should fight - isn’t sure he can. Something tries to grab him and he’s too tired to be scared or do anything about it. The pressure increases and he decides to struggle after all - he doesn’t know why - it’s just in his nature.

“You stupid - you - you idiot!” says a voice he recognizes - a voice that does not belong here.

And he should laugh because Aziraphale’s hands are on him, his arms wrapped round his torso, which is exactly what he’s always wanted, isn’t it? If only he wasn’t a half-bled carcass he might be able to enjoy it more.

“End it,” he begs against the warmth of the Angel’s throat, or at least he tries to but there are no words, just stuttered air and blood against a pristinely starched collar. His thoughts are scattered through pain and confusion: he can see pearlescent light marred with dark crimson strings and he doesn’t seem to be falling any more but the chains are still pulling, their weight dragging and pooling over him, burning where they touch. Is he on the bridge again already? He must be. He wars with himself, needing the pain to stop but knowing to ask such a thing will destroy him more thoroughly than Erebus ever could. The choice is always the same and no matter how his brain gibbers to itself and his body screams there is only one answer.

_(I’ll do anything. End it.)_  
(Do you recant?)  
_(I...)_  
(Do you recant?)  
_(I… I… do… not!)_

Crowley makes a strangled sound that might possibly have been ‘No!’ and does his best to fling himself forward. The Angel, trying to fly and not careen them into the rocks of either Scar or Shame is momentarily thrown off balance and is forced to make a grab for Crowley, catching back hold of him by one arm and the chain in his left shoulder. The Demon howls.

Aziraphale wants to shout at him and ask what the Heaven he thinks he’s playing at, but he knows better than to waste his breath. He’s clinging on to Crowley with one arm and both legs: it’s not exactly dignified, but for once in his exceptionally long existence, he doesn’t care. His wings - beautiful and vast - are beating upwards, dragging them from the depths, punching the distance down and defeating gravity. Awkwardly his other hand searches for the terminals of the chains, pulling them out one by one. It’s not gentle, he can’t afford to be.

“Fold your wings away,” he commands as soon as he’s freed them from their hooks, torn feathers spiraling into the blackness. “Crowley! Fold your wings - this is hard enough as it is! For - for goodness sake - _Crowley!” _

For a moment he thinks the Demon won’t - or can’t - but with a bubbling groan, blood dribbling across his lips, he does as he’s bid.

Aziraphale mutters something heartfelt, half blessing, half curse, all gratitude; Crowley is far easier to hold on to without the weight of his wings getting in the way. He struggles to pull the last hook from Crowley’s ribs, his hands slippery with blood: he can’t find the correct angle to free it and the Demon is twitching and choking ichor every time he tries. He closes his eyes for a moment and prays for forgiveness before wrenching it straight through the two ribs it’s caught on.

Crowley convulses and goes heavy: a dead weight.

Aziraphale almost drops him again.

Fragments of flesh, lung and bone adhere to the surface of the metal before he casts it away with a grimace. He folds his arms more tightly around the Demon and concentrates on forcing his wings to beat harder, defying Erebus with every downward push of feathers into the dark.


	6. Chapter 6

He lies on the bed, wracked and wretched, shivering and sweating sulfur as his body seeks to burn out the holiness it’s contaminated with.

It would be wrong to say he wakes. His breathing hitches, stuttering out of his chest like something caught, something broken. At times he’ll startle, his whole body going rigid, his spine curling and his fingers clawing as if something is being wrenched out of him with enormous force. He makes guttural incoherent sounds and his eyes open wide, raw and golden, yet seeing nothing at all.

Aziraphale remembers that Crowley’s silver chains - no matter how many fathoms, were of a finite length. He tries and fails to imagine what it would be like, falling in the dark and knowing the violent snap of agony that awaits at the end. He shudders, feeling cold and pressing a knuckle hard against his lips.

Crowley’s injuries are grave enough that a human would likely die, or at least require a marathon of gruelling surgeries, a long stint in the ICU and several years of physical therapy. There are numerous half-healed wounds in his forearms and his ankles that bore straight through - a parody of stigmata. There are savage piercing wounds too to either side of his lower spine and the tops of his thighs, barely scabbed over and still bruise black. Aziraphale surmises the hooks that held the Demon had been stabbed into different limbs and flesh at different times, allowing him to heal some of the damage done in between each descent.

Aziraphale had attempted a miraculous healing of his own the moment they were within the safety of the Mayfair flat. But Crowley had screamed - a thin and terrible cry dragged out of him like a final confession - and he’d hastily stopped, falling back on more earthly forms of healing. He wasn’t certain why the miracle had affected the Demon like that; they’d been miracaling things around one another for millennia without so much as a twinge of discomfort. But, he realized, they had never tried to affect one another directly, only their clothes or the objects around them; evidentially healing was different.

* * *

Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley are aware, but Angels find it harder to heal themselves and easier to heal others, whereas Demons are the opposite: just as Angels are stronger yet Demons more resilient. (Call it reversing the polarities, a question of Grace or perhaps just a diametric change in perspective - call it what you will - the fact remains.)

Had Crowley suffered an earthly wound, the Angel would have been able to heal him without incident and the sensation would have been as gentle as a sunbeam. But being poisoned and purified by blessed silver whilst the direct energies of Hell sustained him has rendered Crowley overly sensitive to the working of the divine for the time being. It’s as well that a Demon’s healing is selfish because it allowed Crowley - stubborn serpent that he is - to stay coiled deep in a horribly broken corporation, healing cell by cell the worst and deepest of the hurts that had been done to him.

* * *

“Trust you to be difficult,” the Angel complains, pulling out rolls of bandages from a well-stocked and comprehensive first aid kit that hadn’t previously been in the linen cupboard until he required it. (Crowley’s flat knows what’s good for it.) The wounds at Crowley’s ribs and clavicles are still bleeding sluggishly, although thankfully he must have managed some minor healing himself by instinct, as the brutal punctures through his lungs have closed and the ribs begun to reform, ensuring at least that he shouldn’t discorporate. There’s little to be done about his wings as Aziraphale can’t force them to manifest; he’ll just have to hope Crowley can cope with them on his own.

Aziraphale diligently miracles away the ragged remains of the ruined clothes, and the bloody, sweat-streaked grime of the sort skin can acquire after an unpleasant sojourn in Hell. He cleans the wounds, treating them with antiseptic ointment and heavy gauze once they’ve been disinfected.

Celestial beings - even when inhabiting a corporeal form - are not subject to germs or disease the way mortals are. However, if the Demon’s body is clean and meticulously patched, Aziraphale knows it will make it that much easier to heal once he wakes.

Another miracle (because Aziraphale’s shoulders ache: the flight from Erebus had been a long and strenuous one) and Crowley’s wearing black silk pajamas and safely tucked up in his extravagantly sized bed. The Angel tidies away the first aid kit, disposes of the bloody cloths and towels and ensures the floor isn’t stained. After this he makes himself a pot of Earl Grey tea - his favourite blend from Higgins - and settles down on the chair in the corner of Crowley’s bedroom to wait. (The chair in question is upright, ostentatious, uncomfortable, and entirely not to the Angel’s taste. He considers sternly suggesting to it that it become something a little more homely, but decides in the end that’s Behavior Unbefitting a Houseguest.)

* * *

He sleeps fitfully for almost four weeks, during which time the poisoning caused by the blessed silver is successfully burnt out by high fever. His sweat smells of silver dust, sulfur, hot iron and despair, and the Angel washes him clean each night, redresses his wounds and snaps his fingers so he can lie on pristine sheets. His hair tangles in long, damp curls, in places snarling into elfknots. (Aziraphale supposes that Crowley’s hair has always been like this - or at least is always like this when he cannot pay attention to it. This is not the hair itself growing, this is more like an enchantment breaking: the final prestige of a Demonic trick. He wonders how long the curls will get before Crowley wakes and forces them short again.)

Sometimes his hands will twitch, fingers reaching for something forever unobtainable, panic settling deeper in his soul when he cannot grasp what he seeks.

Aziraphale clasps his hands then, tries to reassure him. He doesn’t know what Crowley is fighting against or running from, doesn’t know what he’s battling. “I’ll fight for you,” he tells him, concern marring his eyes. “If I can. If you’ll let me...”

(It’s something that worries him more than he’s ever admitted - because who could he possibly admit it to? Demons have to be self-sufficient: no one in Hell ever gives aid or succor to any creature, let alone a fellow Demon. It’s why Crowley is so infuriatingly bad at asking for things. Why he has all that style and calculated bravado telling the world he can stand on his own and will kick anyone else in the balls who tries to claim otherwise.)

The thought that Crowley - clever, beautiful, sauntering Crowley - might one day get into trouble he can’t wriggle his way out of… That he might get hurt, that he might just crawl away and Aziraphale wouldn’t know until it was too late, is unbearable to the Angel.

“I’m sorry it took me so long… I didn’t know you were… I’m sorry,” he offers, contrite. “But I’m here now. You’re safe now.” He is saying it as much to convince himself as to convince Crowley; but of the two of them he’s the only one who hears.

* * *

Crowley feels too heavy. Everything hurts and he’s made of gravity and -

Someone’s fingers brush his hair away from his face, the movement gentle and made with infinite care. “It’s all right. You’re safe… You’re perfectly safe, my dear.”

Crowley would like to argue; he doesn’t find ‘safe’ a very believable concept given recent events. He struggles to open his eyes, struggles to make his corporation work like it’s suppose to and not to be this heavy wreck of a thing he seems to be trapped in.

The fingers come back, whispering across his temple and carding through his hair. A reassuring warmth like a promise accompanies them and Crowley feels the fight in him ebb along with his building panic.

“You need to rest.”

He falls back down into a deeper darkness.

* * *

His breathing changes, becoming more labored as he rises towards consciousness and his body tremors as his senses awaken to the pain. Aziraphale touches his palm to Crowley’s cheek: serpentine eyes open with a flinch. Aziraphale hastily takes his hand away, mumbling an apology. (Crowley always has been a little cagey when it comes to demonstrations of concern or affection. He’s a Demon after all.)

He struggles to keep his eyes open, find his focus, and eventually succeeds. He looks at the room dully, confusion lanced between his brows as if he doesn’t recognize where he is, despite being lain in bed in his own flat. Late afternoon sunlight the brassy colour of Autumn is slanting through the windows and gilding all it touches.

“Crowley?” The name is said tentatively.

He turns his head with a wince and sees Aziraphale, the shape of him soft and pale in his familiar cardigan and terrible bowtie, almost shining against the grey modernist lines of the bedroom. The memory imprints across his mind: that golden-white blaze falling through the dark towards him, burning like a star through Erebus. “Y-you…” His voice is cracked and raw. “You were in Hell.”

Aziraphale looks fondly at him. “Well I couldn’t very well leave you there.”

A truly monstrous thought starts to take shape in his brain, bubbling across his synapses and dragging dread in its wake. “You - angel, no! Please - y-you didn’t…”

The naked despair in Crowley’s eyes brings him understanding. “Oh - no, no my dear, I didn’t Fall.” His hands flutter, folding and unfolding themselves like wings and he gives off an aura of acute embarrassment. “I, ah, caused a bit of an international incident, I suppose you could say, all things told. You see Scotchtape - or whatever that uncouth personage was named whom they sent up to replace you - knew exactly where you were. It was incredibly keen to tell me all about it in great detail. Its descriptions of the topography of Hell around Erebus in fact were very poetic. It ought to write a guidebook… Ah, anyway, that solved the question of where you’d got to, all that remained was fetching you back.” He smiles, a soft beam of satisfaction as if the explanation has been neatly wrapped in paper and tied up with string.

Crowley is too tired, too pained to be caustic. “How?”

“Oh, I walked in. The gates to Hell aren’t locked after all. I recalled that when Michael brought the Holy Water for your execution she was unaccompanied. This suggested to me that she must have been there before, to know her way around and remain untroubled by the dross of the rank-and-file. So I wrote a missive - very impressive looking and quite lovely penmanship if I do say so myself - tied it with prayer ribbons, set it with holy seals and packed it up in a leather scroll case. Then I dressed formally - heavenly dinner dress if you must know - and in I walked. Don’t you think it’s a shame no one dresses for dinner any more? Ah, anyway. Everyone assumed I was on official-unofficial business as a messenger of the Lord and left me alone. They did get round to checking eventually, but by the time they got through to anyone in senior management, I was already within Erebus. Heaven dithered for a bit and then decided on a strategy of plausible deniability with a little threat added for good measure. Their standpoint was along the lines of, ‘We are not responsible for his actions and do not condone them. However, he is still a Principality of the Host and if any harm comes to him there will be rather a lot of unfortunate repercussions. And paperwork.’ Gabriel’s _furious _of course and has already left a great many unkind messages for me…” He sighs, aware that now might not be the best time for explanations of his own brilliance regarding the exploitation of the Powers That Be within the infernal hierarchy and celestial bureaucracy. “How do you feel?”

He doesn’t know how to answer that, so he doesn’t. Anthony J Crowley has never been particularly good with feelings - his or other people’s - and right now he is feeling both entirely too much and a terrifyingly large amount of nothing at all. His body has been over-taxed to the point where just lying in bed and keeping his eyes open is an effort that exhausts him.

Aziraphale seems to understand because he leans over to pat his hand and murmurs, “It’ll be all right, dear boy.”

Crowley swallows and tries to channel a little Demonic energy through his body to heal it. The newer wounds do their best to close and scab but he can’t yet rid himself of them completely, they’re too deep and there are too many. “When?” he asks.

“When what?”

“When will it be all right?”

“You need rest. We’ll have you back to your wily old self in no time.” He gives a watery smile, heavy at the edges, its pockets weighed with stones.

Crowley’s eyelids are aching to close, but, “You came for me,” he rasps.

The Angel’s expression calms as if drowning isn’t so bad after all. “Always,” he says.


	7. Chapter 7

Another five weeks pass and the Demon is almost healed: he’s able to limp around his flat, take a bath, scowl at his houseplants.

The first time he sets eyes on his plants elicits a very long and narrow-eyed stare indeed. “Angel?” he enquires tightly. “Did you… _resurrect_… my plants?”

Aziraphale would like to prevaricate but doesn’t know where to begin, so doesn’t.

_“Necromancy,”_ Crowley hisses, just to annoy, although he knows that isn’t strictly true. Still he needs something to hold on to - something to enjoy - and if it’s bloody zombie pot plants then so be it. He wants to swagger, well, no, there’s still too much background pain for that, forget the fucking swagger - he just - he wants to be himself again. And why is it so _blessed _hard?

Crowley is used to feeling lost; that’s always been a given. What he doesn’t understand is the feeling that’s suffusing all of him whether he asks it to or not. (He’d prefer not, but the feeling isn’t listening.) He can’t pinpoint it exactly but it’s vast enough that he thinks he could lob cars at it and end up a winner. Loser. Whatever.

_“Just because you’re zombies now don’t think you can slack off,”_ he hisses at the nearest plant for lack of a better anger outlet.

“Did you say something?”

He immediately folds and then unfolds his arms as he refuses to look at the Angel reading poetry on his sofa. “No.”

* * *

He sleeps most of the time, waking at odd hours with a bitten off breath that seeks to become a scream: the memories of Erebus still bubbling close beneath his skin.

His hair reaches down his back and he can’t yet spare the energy to style it into something more in line with current fashion. He’s been forced to wash it using enough conditioner to keep a Knightsbridge salon in business for a year just so he can drag a brush though it.

Aziraphale watches from the other end of the sofa as he holds a fistful of damp hair in one hand and rips the brush through it with the other. He winces. “I could attend to that if you wish? I’m sure it would be much easier…”

For a split second Crowley’s eyes show a strange burning emotion before he blinks and the expression is snuffed out like a candle. _“No.”_

“Well, as you like. For someone who sleeps as much as you do, you don’t appear very well rested.” Aziraphale gives a concerned look at the lead-grey bruises of fatigue beneath Crowley’s eyes. “Perhaps you ought to eat something too,” he suggests as his gaze takes in the cheekbones that have given up on angular and settled comfortably into gaunt.

“Yeah, bloody haggard abomination, that’s me.”

“Crowley! What on Earth’s got into you?”

_Erebus, _he wants to say, but he doesn’t. “We don’t need to eat.”

Celestial beings inhabiting a corporation do not need to eat or to sleep. They don’t even need to breathe, but they frequently get into the habit of it if only to blend in better with Humanity. Technically their hearts don’t need to beat either, but a corporation that’s been around humans long enough will get its own ideas. So much of life, of the world, is wrapped up in a heartbeat.

Crowley wishes he could ignore his heartbeat; but it belongs to a corporation he’s had for six millennia and which Hell recently almost destroyed, so he doesn’t seem to be in a place to pick and choose. One hand curls crookedly towards his chest, his fingers clutching and unclutching, a whisper away from his sternum.

“Of course we don’t, but that doesn’t mean to say I can’t order in a hamper from Fortnum’s for us to enjoy. I’d offer tea at the Savoy, but you’re in your pyjamas.”

“You don’t need to fuss. I’m fine. Don’t you have a bookshop to run?”

“I’m not fussing, I’m attempting to do something kind, but you’re making it extremely difficult.” He sounds exasperated but he’s smiling too.

Crowley doesn’t feel like himself, he hasn’t ever since he came back. He feels like he’s an automaton: a complicated machine, all tiny brass cogs and screws and clever clockwork incased in armour of the finest bone china. He’s been walking around like that for years, smiling and nodding and passing for human despite his glass-yellow eyes. Only now he’s been dropped (again?) from a great height and has broken into a thousand different parts, a million different fragments. It’s a horrible serrated agony and yet it’s familiar somehow, as if he’s felt it many times before and will be fated to feel it again.

He’s been swept up and dumped in a box and he has no idea how to make himself walk and smile and pretend any more. All he can feel are the jagged remnants of something that called itself Anthony J Crowley rattling round and scoring sharply on his own nerves… He feels the itching need to pace, to shake off the anxiety building within. But pacing infuriates him: his legs are stiff and shaky, his hips still aching with bruises, his ankles barely able to hold him up. “Bugger this,” he growls. “I’m going back to bed.”

Aziraphale follows him from the front room. “Would you care for some tea then?” he asks, still intent on some sort of angelic intervention.

Crowley doesn’t turn back to look at him, just stubbornly walks on broomstick legs without a trace of his serpentine swagger. “Contrary to what most Brits think, you can’t fix the bloody world with tea, angel. Go back to the bookshop. I don’t know what kind of idiot idea this is of yours anyhow, trying to heal people with tea and kindness. I’m _wicked_ \- I’m a Demon - who ever heard of a fucking Demon deserving…”

“Kindness isn’t something you must earn, my dear.”

He’s reached the doorway to his bedroom when he finally turns to glare, swinging round gracelessly to face the Angel. All the discordant pieces of his shattered soul are jangling against one another; his head feels full of tuning forks and broken plates.

_“Oh yeah?” _he wants to ask. _“I thought that’s what existence was: being tested over and over, your whole life some sort of crucible where you’re melted down and then hammered out and it’s meant to be for your own good. Tempered. Beaten and battered out in flames and quenched in water, held over embers, folded over and beaten out again. And the more you’re beaten the stronger you get - and if you break you were never worthy. Tested to destruction - isn’t that what all this is? Isn’t that what She meant from the start? Knowledge and Free Will and the Tree in the bloody Garden, it’s all a test. She tested us once…” _

Aziraphale’s face looks horrified and it takes a moment for Crowley to catch up, to realize he’s spoken aloud.

He gives a wobbly smile. “I didn’t make the grade. _Obviously_. The world isn’t kind, angel. Especially not if you’re bad.” He would, if he wasn’t so pained and miserably lost, be embarrassed by such a child-like utterance. “Demons don’t get kindness.” He’d meant that they don’t receive kindness, but a case could be made for them not understanding kindness either. Aziraphale looks at him and Crowley stares blankly back, the red snarls of his hair contrasting against the hollows of his cheeks. “Will it be much longer?” he asks at last.

“Will what be much longer?”

“Eternity.”

“I don’t take your meaning…”

“I’m tired of all this… When do I break? I don’t want to be tested any more.”

Aziraphale bows his head and swallows, trying to blink away the burn of salt that has sprung up in his eyes and the piercing hurt that has lanced through his chest. A Principality is made to protect - that is their purpose. Aziraphale had believed in his duty for six thousand years: that he was formed and placed upon Earth to protect Humanity. Now at last, he understands that whilst some duties are bestowed, others are assumed. He had thought he was fighting for Heaven and on behalf of Humanity. He knows differently now. It was never that simple.

He closes the distance between them and pulls the Demon towards him, gathers him up in his arms and holds him too tightly.

Crowley’s head is pressed against his shoulder: he’s skinny, rigid and compliant; he might as well be a jointed Victorian doll carved of ivory.

Aziraphale’s left arm is wrapped around him, whilst his right palm cups his jaw, touches his temple, runs lightly though his still-tangled hair - cherishes him. “Please don’t break my dearest.” His fingers trail down and rest against the edge of Crowley’s throat; the Demon shivers and makes a sound that is no sound at all, a stuttered indrawn breath. “You do deserve kindness, whatever you may think, and I am sorry if the world has not given it to you.” His voice is sincere too, resonating with hope and sadness and the harmonics of the Heavenly Host.

The splinter in Crowley’s heart lurches as he feels the echoes of Grace in those words. The Want behind his breastbone laps it up and claws for more. This will be what breaks him, Crowley knows. He’s Fallen: fallen from Heaven, fallen through Erebus and fallen in love - and he knows which hurts the most. But this unasked for kindness, this gentleness so willingly given when the void within him Wants and desires and screams with all its grubby-fingered need, this will be what ends him. He tries to move away; it won’t save him, he knows it won’t, but it might save Aziraphale from being dragged down with him. A low keening noise comes from the back of his throat: an animal in a trap that knows too much of its blood has seeped into the earth.

“Stop that,” Aziraphale admonishes, the crystal chimes of Heaven’s light swirled away in a fussy sort of vexation. And, “You’re alright. I have you. I have you. Please, dearest, oh my dear one…”

He used to like it when Aziraphale called him ‘dear boy’. It wasn’t anything special, Crowley knew - he wasn’t stupid - the Angel called everyone ‘my dear’ or some variation on the theme. It was the smallest benediction, but it fed the Want that raged in Crowley’s chest and the void in him arched towards it like a cat seeking to be stroked. _Say it again, _he’d always think. _Tell me I’m dear to you._

But now, after six thousand years, after a fall from Grace and a fall through Hell when he’s already (don’t say it - don’t say it) fallen in love, it’s too much. Crowley is sick of it: heart sick and love sick and hollowed out from the inside with a need that burns his bastard heart to ash and yet somehow never manages to kill him. He isn’t certain what he did that was so offensive within the Almighty’s sight. To be punished like this it must have been monstrous. And yet, if it was so awful, why doesn’t he remember it? _Fuck ineffability. __You’re not unknowable, _he thinks bitterly. _I know you very well. You’re just cruel._

Crowley is lost and furious and more broken than he has ever been. He struggles out of Aziraphale’s arms and backs away into his bedroom until he pitches up against the side of his bed. “Don’t say that,” he grates.

“Don’t say what?”

“Don’t fucking _call me that _when you don’t _mean _it!” A chimera sound, part giggle and part sob tumbles from his mouth.

Aziraphale is startled and uncertain how to address that. “You - you never objected to it before. It’s just a turn of phrase…”

“Exactly,” he says, sitting heavily on the corner of the mattress - receiving a jolt of pain for his trouble - his voice like a lead pipe against bone. “You don’t mean it. I’m not ‘dear’.”

“Well now, that I must object to! You are in fact a very dear friend, so it’s not disingenuous of me to use such a word. Honestly, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss…”

He holds his head in his hands and weaves his fingers distractedly into his hair so he can claw at his scalp, feeling trapped and exposed. The Want is like a living thing inside him and he wishes he could crack open his sternum and rip it out, fling it on the floor at Aziraphale’s feet. _There - that’s what I have inside me - that’s what I’ve had since Eden and I’m pretty sure it’s your fucking fault. Why did you have to be kind - why couldn’t you be a bastard like the others?_

He looks up at the Angel: a glare of fire and desolation, of drowning without end. “Why? Because I fell in love - with you!” The anguished cry is ripped from him like a knife from a wound, leaving his feelings to bleed through his fingers and all over the floor. “Pretty fucking pathetic for a Demon, eh? I’d be laughing myself if it wasn’t so tragic. And don’t tell me - I know - Demons are incapable of the nobler emotions, we just get the low-down dirty stuff to wallow in like lust and jealously. And maybe it’s not love - how should I know? But it’s like I’ve got this - this void in me - this great bastard hole right in my chest - this _lack_. And it’s screaming at me to fill it and it’s so loud sometimes I can’t even think straight and the only thing - the only single thing it wants in all of Creation - is you, angel.” His voice sounds broken and the words are all gravel and glass in his throat; he’s surprised his tongue doesn’t bleed. He should care, he knows, that he’s reduced to this, this shamed pathetic Graceless thing, writhing in need, willing to subjugate itself for affection.

_(I’ll do anything angel, I swear, please…)_

“I - I want to be with you. I want to laugh with you at the absurdity of the world. I want to take you to restaurants and see that cupid-curl of a smile you get when you appreciate the food. I wanna get drunk with you and have arguments about philosophy. I want to exasperate you and have you call me a ‘foul fiend’ or something just as ridiculous. I - I want to know that you’re safe and that you’re happy and that I had something to do with it. I want you to enjoy the world and be ecstatic about first editions and snuffboxes and Glyndebourne. I want to see you grin - that bloody megawatt beam you do that’s like the sun. Somebody help me, I want to run my fingers through your hair, I want to trace the lines of your palms and the veins of your wrists. I want to taste the hollow of your throat - I want to place kisses down your spine. I want to know every inch of you. I want to get on my knees and worship you until She smites me for idolatry. I want to drink you in like sacrament until I _burn_ with it. I want you - all of you - everything about you. I want you beside me until the end of time.” His voice catches but he forces the final words out to bleed from his lips. “I want you so much that given the choice between remaining in Hell, or returning to Earth after six thousand years of falling into Erebus again and again - _I fucking chose Erebus.”_


	8. Chapter 8

His eyes are fully golden and tears are spilling down his cheeks but be doesn’t care. None of it matters any more because after managing the balance, walking this emotional razor wire for so long, he’s finally fucked up - he’s fucked everything up. He’s confessed the one thing he had to keep secret. _This is how the world ends - not with a bang but with opening your smart mouth like an idiot._

“An’ - an’ I know you don’t - you, you can’t - I _know_…” The words strangle to a stop because Crowley is impatient now for the sword of Damocles hanging over his head to fall and put him out of his misery.

Silence seeks to spin webs of awkwardness around the room but with an effort Aziraphale dispels it. “That’s, ah, well, what a remarkable collection of things to say.”

Crowley glares at him miserably.

Aziraphale folds his hands neatly, looks at them without really seeing them. He’s gone very still as if the Demon is something wild that will bolt if not approached in a calm and exacting manner. There are too many important things to address and, like a puzzle box, they must be done in the right order. He just hopes he knows what the order is. The horrifying matter of six millennia in Erebus demands his attention but he studiously ignores it. “May I ask… did I hear correctly that you said I couldn’t love you?”

He nods.

“And what was it that led you to that conclusion?”

Crowley swallows, feeling grey and nauseous. “Grace,” he says, his voice like shrapnel. “It - it’s perfect, isn’t it?” Tremoring hands rise and fall trying to give shape to the ineffable. “The adoration of the Almighty, the love for all things. You’re an Angel,” he grates. “You love everything - it’s what you do. And She loves you!” He’s laughing now, a broken simulacrum of mirth that steals the breath from him and makes his body twitch. “You - you don’t want anything else. The - the space is all filled up.”

Aziraphale looks at him then, a soft expression of infinite sorrow. “Love doesn’t work like that,” he says gently. “It’s not a vessel to be filled. It’s a capacity to be extended towards others: an endless wellspring. And whilst, perhaps, your assessment of the Host may have been correct in the beginning, I do not think it’s like that for any of us any more, not since the Silver City…”

“Went corporate.”

“…changed,” Aziraphale decides, “after the war.”

Crowley wraps his arms round himself as if that might save him from falling apart entirely. He’s on the point of shattering as it is; he feels like a champagne flute that is having 550Hertz of high decibel pitch leveled at it.

“So on that point I should very much like to disagree. Angels are not only beings of love, they are quite capable of experiencing and desiring love also.”

The Demon gives a twitchy shake of the head; he can’t afford to believe Aziraphale. The splinter in his heart gives another twist and he flinches, blanching.

Aziraphale looks worried; Crowley has been through a lot and whilst his body has mostly healed, his mental and emotional state appear distinctly fragile. Still, the conversation can’t be left half-finished. He steps forward, squaring his shoulders as if preparing for battle. He looks at Crowley, trying to infuse his expression with a calm he doesn’t feel. “And I know that I’m correct, because I myself…” he falters before pushing on, his eyes bright. “Because I myself am in love,” he flashes a small nervous smile. “I have been for some time now.” Another step forward and he kneels next to him at the side of the bed - his elbows brushing Crowley’s legs - gathering up the Serpent’s slender hands in his. “With you, Crowley. I love you.”

Crowley looks betrayed and broken and bloodless as if Aziraphale has just slid a knife between his ribs. “No. Stop - stop it…”

“Please,” the Angel entreats.

And for the first time in his life, Crowley can’t. He scowls, shakes his head, tries to draw away. “You don’t, you… Don’t be that much of a bastard,” he begs.

Aziraphale stops cold. “I - what do you take me for?”

“I know you don’t…” _Love me, _gets caught on his teeth so he shakes his head again. “Don’t pretend.”

He is genuinely mystified. _“Pretend?”_

Crowley laughs and it catches in his throat and something in it won’t give up or go away and the Want in him is chewing up his heart. One hand has freed itself to claw weakly at his sternum and he can’t tell any more whether he’s trying to assuage the hurt or wrench it open further. His nails dig harder and leave welts at the skin within the exposed V of his pyjama collar.

“Crowley!” alarmed Azirphale grips Crowley’s shoulders, pressing to force him still whether through pain or proximity, staring at the Demon’s eyes, waiting for the golden amber to acknowledge him - to see him. “Crowley please…” He does not say ‘my dear’ although he wishes to, because greater than his desire for intimacy is his need for the Demon to understand, to be well - to be whole in a way he so clearly is not.

The bright edge of hysteria dulls back into misery, the nails cease to tear, the hand falls uselessly against the bed. And, “You can’t love someone out of pity - or duty - or compassion,” he snarls.

“But I don’t,” Aziraphale protests. “None of those are reasons why I love you.”

Crowley is breathing raggedly and his heart is smashing itself against the inside of his ribs hard enough to bruise - hard enough to burst. “Why?” He should have learnt, he thinks, to stop asking that question, to stop opening his stupid traitor mouth.

“Because you’re marvelous. You’re brave, and you’re clever. You’re kind - although you don’t like me to say so. You’ve defied both Heaven and Hell to stand for what you believe is right. Atrocity and injustice bother you. You find things in this world that appeal to you and you take joy in them. Other Demons don’t keep houseplants or listen to bebop. They don’t drive vintage cars they take great pride in. They don’t stick coins to the pavement and consider that a suitably wicked ill to visit upon Humanity. They don’t get maudlin over innocents who have suffered in the world. They don’t rescue Angels from Nazis or save books. They certainly do not treat their hereditary enemies to lunch. My dear, you are unique and extraordinary and there is no one else like you. I was always going to love you eventually - I think it was inevitable.”

Crowley opens his mouth to disagree, because the reflex is ingrained now like a stain on his character. Partly it’s a lagging sense of pride in what little Demonic activity he does get up to (he’s not nice, he’s never nice) and in part it’s something that if he cared to examine, he’d find was just self-hate: a base belief that Anthony J Crowley was the reason why Anthony J Crowley Couldn’t Have Nice Things. But the Want is clawing its way up his throat again and all but suffocating him, so, “When?” is what he chokes out instead.

“When did I fall in love with you?” Aziraphale looks embarrassed and a little melancholy. “I’m afraid it took me entirely too long to admit it to myself - I had seen but not observed, to borrow a line from Arthur Conan Doyle… It may have been at the Globe. It might have been as far back as Rome... But when I realised - when I truly knew... It was in ’41 at the church of St Andrew in Holburn. When you saved my books.”

Dimly, Crowley is aware he should be happy - ecstatic even. But instead what he feels is a resentful sense of betrayal. “1941,” he parrots back flatly. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Aziraphale’s eyebrows rise at that but he doesn’t imagine the Demon is in the mood for a lecture on hypocrisy. “Many reasons. I am slow to recognize change; Principalities were created as guards and soldiers - we’re better with orders.” A flicker of a smile. “Not that I proved to be terribly good at that in the end… I still had my faith and my loyalty to Heaven…”

Crowley’s lip rises in a half-hearted sneer, although he looks dejected rather than angry. His eyes never meet Aziraphale’s face for long, stealing small glances from beneath lowered lashes.

“And for a while of course, at the beginning, I tried to convince myself it was… a thing.”

His head snaps up sharply to dart another look. “A thing?”

“A…” he gestures hopelessly. “You know. An infatuation. That I’d become momentarily distracted by your charm. Tempted, if you will.”

Troubled, Crowley’s gaze lowers to the bed sheets, his knees, the floor.

“Those weren’t the only reasons I kept silent: I have yet to tell you the most important. Indeed,” his brows cant and he looks stern, “if those were the only reasons I should be deeply disappointed with myself.” He blinks and his lips purse as if he might be angry with himself anyway, as if he’s trying to find the right words to offer an explanation instead of an excuse.

“You know that I have always been very… cagey about the Arrangement. The primary reason why I resisted the idea for so long was not because I felt it was a dereliction of duty, but rather because I recognized the danger it placed us in. Danger you didn’t seem to recognize or care about in the least. I was nervous that our superiors would discover it because if they did... Well, yes, I certainly would have been punished - what of it? You would have been destroyed! First and foremost you are my oldest friend, Crowley - and you can be so _reckless _sometimes!” A look of anguish glazes his eyes and he hurries to blink it away. “The idea that Heaven or Hell should find out that I loved you - or worse yet! - that it was _mutual?” _His voice has risen and he seeks to soften it again. “Do you not understand what awful danger that would have brought? I care for you too much - no - I love you too much to allow my feelings to endanger you.”

Crowley stares at nothing at all, trying to come to terms with the enormity of the revelation that’s just been tipped into his lap. The Angel has always been cautious, always worried about the probity of his position. (Although in his snider moments Crowley wonders if that’s less about correct moral rectitude and more to do with wanting a quiet life and not to receive bitchy notes from Gabriel.) “So… so did you know? How I felt?”

“Not at first. Not for a very long time if I’m honest. I thought you sought me out to cause trouble; or thought that perhaps you simply found me amusing.”

He snorts. “I did. It just… backfired a bit. _And if you say anything about the nature of evil containing the seeds of its own destruction then I’m turning into a snake right now and fucking staying like that.”_

“I wouldn’t dream of it. I didn’t plumb the depths of Erebus just to have you turn into twelve feet of bratty hosepipe at the first opportunity.”

“Bratty hosepipe?!”

“Yes - you’re terribly finicky when you’re in that form.”

“I am not…”

“City of Babylon. I rest my case.”

“They’d bloody burnt Nebuchadnezzar’s gardens! I was in a supremely bad mood - I loved those gardens!”

Aziraphale cants his head to the side with a hum, conceding the Demon may have a point.

Crowley’s indignation cools towards melancholy again and he flicks Aziraphale little sideways looks, uncertain what to do. He doesn’t like being still when he’s this nervous but he doesn’t want to move away from the Angel either. However irrational it is he feels the other’s presence is grounding him. He doesn’t want to ask, just in case the answer kills him, but he has to ask because curiosity has always been his downfall. He swallows and resists the urge to fidget. “What… what happens now?”

The other considers, his expression grave and calculating. “I think that rather depends, don’t you? Heaven has made it clear that I am essentially a free agent - perhaps even a rogue one - and that they want nothing to do with me. I suspect I’m rather an embarrassment to them... They don’t know what to do with me so have chosen to do nothing at all.”

“You can do what you like?" _(Please, please angel...)_

“Yes, I rather suspect I can, so long as I don’t tread on too many toes.”

“Stopped the Apocalypse - don’t think you could tread on more toes if you tried, angel.”

“Well. Quite. The side of the equation that bears closer study is your position with Hell.”

Crowley shrugs. “Hell’s vindictive. It’s good with grudges.”

“Do you believe they’ll come for you again?”

A second smaller shrug. “Might. Might decide I’m too much trouble after all. I mean they had the trial and that was a monumental balls-up for them: the traitor Crowley immune to Holy Water! I reckon Hastur went and bitched to Lucifer. Lucifer decided that in trying to avert Armageddon I’d kicked him in the pride and in the balls and he wouldn’t stand for that… But now, now he’s got a traitor Demon who’s immune to Holy Water _and _who got out of Erebus. No one gets out of Erebus it’s an abyss - that’s the point.”

_“The_ Abyss,” Aziraphale corrects and then wishes he hadn’t because Crowley flinches.

“I don’t think they’ll try anything else for fear of being made to look like a boiling pot of wankers for the third time in a row. There’s incompetent and then there’s just ridiculous - it’s bad for their rep.”

“I don’t imagine any other Demon has their own personal Angelic ‘get out of Hell free’ card.”

Crowley bites his tongue: he wants to make some scathing comment about ‘celestial taxi service’ because this is what he’s always done. He’ll seek Aziraphale out and they’ll start to talk; an exchange of pleasantries, idle chat. And all the while Crowley will be circling him, walking round him, pausing at his left shoulder before circling again. He’d told himself it was predatory; he was a Demon after all. By the time the Arrangement was in place he told himself it was cautionary and protective. He circled so he could see their surroundings: orbiting like a satellite, getting in every angle, every scrap of information so he might be ready if any attack came. It was only a century of so after that, when the Want had grown so loud in his chest it wasn’t just a whisper but a full-blown howling storm of banshees, that he - _idiot _\- finally realized.

Crowley circles so he can stare at Aziraphale, take in every detail and catalogue every gesture.

The line of his jaw and the curve of his ear. The spring in the set of his curls, and whether they’re more white or more gold than the last time he’s seen them. The flutter of the angel’s hands as he speaks, half-made gesture he’s always seeking to still. The broad, straight planes of his back and shoulders, something military in their bearing. The pink bow of his mouth and the fairness of his cheeks…

He’ll circle until he’s lost, until the Want is salivating and clawing inside him, like a starving wretch observing a feast they can never attend. He will realize then that he is a second away from reaching out and touching Aziraphale. Mortified, he’ll say something surly and snappish instead, a conversational aposematic warning to remind the Angel that he’s not to be trusted. And then he’ll stalk off as if he has better places to be, _‘See you around, angel,’_ or _‘Ciao,’_ flung casually over his shoulder.

It’s an old, old dance and Crowley’s become well practiced in every step. He grits his teeth and forces himself to still, to bring the dance to a clumsy close, incomplete. “Thankss,” he manages, the word sounding like ground glass and grimaces. “For getting me out.”

Aziraphale’s expression is hard to read but then it smoothes into a little smile. “Think nothing of it. You’re welcome.” He pats Crowley’s knee. “Come along. I’ll make us a pot of tea and we can toast to being free agents.” He raises an eyebrow. “Unless you have something more suitable?”

Crowley can’t recall whether he drank the Warre’s port before being dragged to Hell, but he’s certain if he glares at the kitchen cupboards enough that something suitable will make itself known. “There's probably some Dom Perignon kicking about somewhere.”

“Oh, lovely,” the Angel beams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'The Silver City' is how Neil Gaiman refers to Heaven in Sandman, so I thought it might be neat if that was how the Angels in this referred to it too.


	9. Chapter 9

Crowley isn’t certain how the question of ‘what happens next?’ has been so completely swept under the carpet.

They’ve been in balance for millennia. It isn’t a comfortable equilibrium for Crowley to stay in but he’s held it. It could be argued this tilt of circumstance has been a long time coming, and goodness knows Crowley has been yearning towards this precipice forever, wondering if he dare inch them closer. But now they teeter on the edge of it and Crowley knows better than anyone that when a fall comes, it comes with a rush: Terror twines around the Want and tangles in his chest seeking to strangle it.

He scrapes his bottom lip between his teeth nervously. For once, he thinks he might ignore the metaphorical lump under the carpet and wait a while to gather the courage to investigate it. A lot has happened and every which way he’s exhausted. Besides, if he doesn’t poke about, doesn’t open his stupid mouth and ask, then he can’t mess it up, can he? No, far safer to keep his trap shut and drink a glass of champagne. Or better yet find some whisky. His thoughts fight and scrap amongst themselves: champagne is for celebration, whisky commiseration, and he can’t tell which is appropriate. The kitchen hedges its bets and comes up with a small bottle of Isle of Jura just in case.

Back in the sitting room there’s a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket on the coffee table, along with some bread and smoked salmon, patê, cheese and Merlot grapes that Aziraphale found in the fridge. The Angel has brought out plates and cutlery too and arranged things to his satisfaction. Crowley turns on the music system and adds the whisky and a couple of cut-crystal tumblers to the spread. The Sonos starts to play the ensemble version of ‘Perfect Day’ the BBC did back in ‘97. The Demon thinks this might be laying it on a bit thick but lets it pass.

“Well, this is fabulous,” Aziraphale says with a smile as he pours the champagne.

Belatedly Crowley realizes that this is remarkably close to the contents of a Fortnum’s hamper; it appears the Angel got his way after all. He wonders whether to be annoyed or impressed. Perhaps he should invent a portmanteau word: improyed - he’s very _improyed _with Aziraphale.

They eat, a sort of gentrified Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party. Mostly Crowley drinks the Jura after a brief sip of champagne when they toast. (“To new beginnings,” Aziraphale smiles. “Beginnings,” Crowley echoes and wishes it didn’t feel so much like an end.) The Angel looks reproachfully at the other’s empty plate and Crowley sweeps his gaze back and forth over the spread, trying to find something the idea of consuming doesn’t make him want to vomit. What the Hell is wrong with him? _It’s food - FFS - just eat it, _he tries to school himself.

“You simply must try the patê - allow me…” Aziraphale takes his plate and places two slices of patê on charcoal crackers along with a small sprig of grapes and a narrow slice of smoked cheese and quince.

Crowley takes the plate with a nod, drinks his whisky and tries to remember how to eat. It can’t be that hard, can it? Open mouth, insert food, then - then - _choke_, his imagination supplies. Fuck. He pulls the grapes off their stalks and then twists the stalk between his fingers - strange woody little thing that’s more like a bronchial tract than a plant.

Aziraphale has been talking and usually Crowley would be hanging on every single word, but he can’t seem to focus. He wants to be alright - he needs to be alright - and he’s pushing everything he has into achieving that goal but it’s just not happening. He’s failing, as usual - fucking it up. Could there not just be one thing - one bastard bloody thing he doesn’t mess up? His insides are tensing up again, the core of him tightening and the scabs on his wounds split and weep, and his jaw is locking and he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to choke down any more, it’s just habit.

“Might I?”

The question startles him out of a deepening gyre of confused self-hate. “What are…”

Aziraphale has put down his plate and is holding a hairbrush. Crowley would like to make a fuss about it but he hasn’t really the wherewithal. Hellish interventions are beyond him: he’s carefully channeling what power he has into fixing his corporation.

People don’t have wings - he does. People who have two of their ribs and a scoop of their lung violently pulled out don’t live. He does. People don’t…. well people just don’t. But right now he’s soul sick and doesn’t care what people or anyone else does - doesn’t care at all - all he wants - he _Wants_…. And he’ll never get it. He thinks he understands now. Falling was never his punishment - Aziraphale was. He looks at the brush warily.

“If you’d allow me?” the Angel asks.

_(Anything - everything - please…) _And that’s the problem. He can’t quite say yes; he manages a stiff sort of nod, more of a twitch really.

“Well if you’d just turn towards the window a bit…”

Aziraphale’s hands are on his shoulders, lightly guiding him, and the wounds beneath his collarbones smart and sting at the contact but at this point he’d claw his own nails into them and mine for blood just to have the Angel patch him back up. _You’re utterly pathetic, _he tells himself, but the Want doesn’t care. He shivers.

“Oh - are you cold? I could fetch a blanket, or…”

“No!” It’s sharper than he meant, strangled at the edges.

_(Don’t go - don’t fucking go anywhere - I can’t stand it - please.)_

“Well, if you’re comfortable…” Aziraphale diligently sweeps all of Crowley’s hair over his shoulders, fanning it out across his back in a tangled mane. Then starting at the right side he carefully separates a section, no more than a handful, and holds it firmly so he can start to brush the knots out, beginning at the ends and patiently working his way up. Once that section is done he separates another handful of hair and begins again.

This close, side by side on the sofa, Aziraphale knows what Crowley smells like. He smells clean of course, but beneath that he smells of snakeskin, of alcohol and hot iron - like a poker quenched in brandy - set off with a sand-dry dusting of bitter-sweet spices: clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger. It’s in the scent of his hair, even stronger than the smell of the conditioner he drenched it in. He smells a little of blood too. Aziraphale frowns and one hand hovers, wishing to touch and to heal, but it can’t - he can’t - and so he returns to the matter of Crowley's hair, purpose unfulfilled.

Throughout it all Crowley is still - rigid - he might be carved from ice, or salt. At last the Angel makes a hum of satisfaction and Crowley thinks he’s survived the ordeal. But then Aziraphale is pulling the brush in long, even strokes across the Demon’s scalp and through the full length of his hair. Although Aziraphale is careful, once or twice the bristles scrape across the wounds in his shoulders and the hurt mixed with the delirious, dreamy tenderness of Aziraphale’s fingers and the brush in his hair burns through to his core. His head tips back of its own volition and his spine arches even as he’s shivering and heat seems to be spilling from his eyes even though he’s closed them - traitors - and he wants Aziraphale’s fingers in his wounds and in his hair.

_You’re killing me - you’re killing me with kindness - fuck - just finish it - please…_

Crowley doesn’t want to be himself right now - he needs a break (to break?) - wants to crawl out of his own skin. He wonders if there’s a corner of Aziraphale’s heart he could hide in and immediately loathes himself for the thought. What sort of sentimental twaddle is that? Why has the word ‘twaddle’ just come into his head? Okay, fuck, he really hates himself now. Maybe the whisky had been a bad idea; it isn’t so much smoothing the edges as spinning his brain like a dremel on a drill. It's all getting to be too much. He rolls his shoulders and leans away, signalling he's had enough. He glances at the Angel and instantly wishes he hadn't. “Could you - stop looking like that.”

“Like what?”

_“Stop looking at me.”_

“Why?” He asks the question so innocently that Crowley doesn’t know what to do with it, all his half-formed invective answers flounder.

“Just - just don’t,” he snaps, rubbing at his eyes and cheeks brusquely.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale apologises immediately and Crowley wants to gnaw his own tongue off in repentance.

“No - no I… never mind,” he ends lamely.

Azirapale notices Crowley’s skin has blanched - a feat he had not thought possible - and his breathing has shallowed, is now tiny stutter-sips. “Crowley…" The question won't be appreciated he knows, but he can’t not ask. “Are you alright?”

The Demon’s smile flares bright and awful for a second before falling into something more normal. “Yeah,” he says, his voice soft but tattered at the edges. “Tip-top, me.” He swallows and tries to tack a grin on his lips; he turns his head away as the expression falls off, wondering if he can pin it back again. 'Tip-top' is not what he wishes to say, is not what is in his head in reply to that particular query.

_Alright? Eh, no, I’m really not, _he wants to say. _I’ve been asleep for two months and I still feel like shit. I’ve got scabs on my collarbones and wings - lets not talk about my ribs - and there are bruises everywhere else. My bones bloody ache. My hair’s ridiculous and I’m too tired to fix it - how sad is that? If I close my eyes for too long I start to get vertigo - I can feel it happening again - the gravity and the weightlessness curling round me and worse than that is the snag I’ll get when it ends, and that feels like my skeleton’s being yanked out of my body and - and stop looking so bloody concerned - stop looking at me like that - just stop…_

Demons are frequently conniving how to get the better of one another. This isn’t necessarily because they hate each other, it’s more because Hell is a literal cutthroat corporate monstrosity where there’s LSD in the watercooler and ‘getting axed’ is not a metaphor. This will give Demons a healthy mistrust of their fellow coworkers, a rampant paranoia about anyone who smiles when offering them a hand to shake and the knowledge that they absolutely must not, under any circumstances, allow anyone to see when they are weak or wounded.

The fact that Aziraphale is in Crowley’s flat whilst the Demon is in just such a state is really starting to rasp across his nerves like low-grade sandpaper.

He honestly thought the whisky would help, but now he just feels off-balance on top of everything else. He stands uncertainly. “I need a pair of scissors to do something about my bloody hair,” he complains and there’s a strained, frantic note to his voice. And then, “Stop looking at me like that - stop fussing!” His tone is less vicious than he’d feared but not by much. “Stop being so calm and patient about everything. You’ve done your bit and swooped in - played the hero, well done - everybody’s very impressed. Why are you still here? I mean, what the fuck do you even want? Because I can’t stand to be in the same room as me right now so fuck knows what you’re doing!”

“Crowley…” he says it like a caress and the Demon forgets how to breathe. It’s just as well he doesn’t have to because he stares at the Angel for two minutes and forty three seconds and doesn’t blink or inhale once. Then he grabs the bottle of Jura, throws his head back and downs the whisky, all the while looking like he wishes someone would light him on fire and be done with it.

Aziraphale stands, reaches out a hand and lays his fingers on the Demon’s pulse.

Crowley instantly stills as if his fingers are a blade. “What… Y-you - you can’t…”

“Stop me,” the Angel suggests, taking the whisky from him and putting it down.

Crowley is unable to articulate any words.

And now Aziraphale’s hands are tugging gently at his pyjamas, slipping beneath the sleek fabric. One hooks into the waistband at his hip and idles there, contemplative. The other rises, skipping across his stomach, tracing across the hollow of his sternum. The Want is like a black hole inside him and he needs to drown the Angel in it, his whole chest feels concave with desire and-

_That’s what I do, _he thinks. _That’s my job, isn’t it? To ruin everything. I’m going to ruin this - I’m going to ruin him. _He startles, a shudder running through him like he’s just licked a live-wire. “Don’t,” he manages, the hardest word he’s ever uttered.


	10. Chapter 10

“You - no - you can’t…”

Aziraphale regards him. His eyes are a very bright blue tinged with green, like the Earth seen from space. His expression is calm and determined. “What are you afraid of?”

Crowley's memory of tranquility is aeons distant, he doesn't understand how the Angel can be so unperturbed. He tries to stutter out words, his hands held palms out, although whether in warding or surrender he can’t say. They've stood close and stood together before but this is fundamentally different; there's something strangely singleminded about the Angel, something almost dangerous.

Aziraphale catches hold of both hands, his fingers circling the skin of his wrists like fetters. Crowley makes an incoherent hiss because he has never Wanted so much and so desperately in his life and his restraint is a sorry thing, tattered and broken - shredded by the storm inside him. But this is Aziraphale, the one thing in all Creation he cannot do without - the one thing in all Creation he cannot fuck up - the one thing he cannot touch - who’s now touching him. Crowley takes a stumbling step back without looking and Aziraphale follows, leaning in, advancing. Crowley takes another step and another until he’s abruptly pitched up against the wall halfway between the front room and the bedroom. He wants to explain but the words are stuck in his throat: he looks hopelessly at the Angel and shakes his head. “Can't - you…”

Aziraphale smiles, gentle and beatific, and even before his lips are pressed against his throat Crowley's breath has stuttered to almost nothing. “Be not afraid,” he murmurs against his pulse feeling the staccato flutter of it whisper beneath his lips.

Crowley tips his chin up and to the left although he shouldn’t, bears his throat because he can’t do anything else. “Please…” he moans. He repents almost immediately, stalling for time and space because whilst he doesn’t want a single inch of air between them he’s making one final attempt to be better than he is. His eyes are unfocused, pupils wide, burning every last scrap of willpower he has. It's never going to be enough, he knows - he always knows he'll mess it up - but he has to try. (Crowley has the sort of moral compass that is so particular that even the Almighty has in the past raised an eyebrow in gentle inquiry.) “You can’t,” he utters, voice crumbling, a last defence against a siege he doesn’t want to win.

Aziraphale pins his hands low to the wall and looks at him - seeing him and accepting him for everything that he is. _“I know you,”_ he says in Enochian, the language of Heaven.

It blesses and scalds Crowley like sunlight, like loss: he’s been frozen forever and those words are a bonfire all around him. “You… No - I’ll - I’ll burn you - I...”

“Perhaps I want to be burnt.” His serenity is undiminished. 

His eyes are are wide-gold and bleeding salt and, “No - no - you don’t…”

And Aziraphale’s mouth is pressed against his, that soft pink cupid’s bow and it scorches like a brand and all of Crowley’s thoughts are seared from his head as the Angel’s tongue licks into his mouth. He makes a small noise like something wounded and his legs aren’t as steady as they were a moment ago.

“I choose this for myself._ I love you…”_

Crowley opens his eyes again and the world is bright and blurred at the same time; the scope of his vision is filled with the pale halo of Aziraphale’s hair and the bright blue of his eyes, edged with a hint of green. His smile is luminous and he’s looking at Crowley like he’s something worthy - something deserving of being seen. The Want is a maelstrom now and Crowley’s last pretense of good intentions are battered away and he doesn’t ever think he’ll get them back. Aziraphale’s hands still pin his and he hasn’t done a thing about it, but now he shifts, straining towards him because he needs to feel the Angel’s hands on him. _You poor pathetic touch-starved bastard, _he thinks, trying to regain traction, regain a sense of - anything. But the Want is a force of nature that cannot be assuaged, only submitted to.

Aziraphale seems to sense the conflict in him, the losing battle of resolve. He pushes up against the Demon, chest to chest and hip to hip. His lips brush Crowley’s ear as he whispers, “What do you want?”

_(You. Always you. Anything - everything - I want your hands on me, please - I - kiss me again - you can - please - can you…) _But the words that exit his mouth in a breathless exhale are, _“Ruin me.”_

Aziraphale gives him a shrewd look before smiling. Love as destruction? Well if that wasn’t the most Crowley thing to say. It’s not his fault: every love the Demon’s ever known has been pain. _Oh my dear, _he thinks, sorrow twinned with joy. _Suffering is not what you deserve. Sweetness doesn’t need to hurt. And one day I hope to make you realize that. _“Everything you want, my dear.”

And it’s only the weight of the Angel pressed against him that prevents him falling to his knees. As it is he staggers, hips and legs too weak, too loose. But then the Angel is letting go of his wrists so he can steady him with one hand and snap his fingers with the other and get rid of Crowley’s pyjama top. His fingers are eager to map the pale plain of his torso: tracing over his ribs and the bruises that linger, the lean shallow of his stomach after the sharp jut of his hips. The contours of his chest and shoulders, the hollows at his collarbones and throat. Aziraphale’s fingers are greedy to know all of it. Crowley bows his shoulders back when the Angel runs his fingers across his nipples and then brings the pad of his thumb back to revisit the area in earnest because it makes Crowley writhe and utter incoherent curses in Enochian. Aziraphale kisses him too; he tastes of whisky and embers and longing. He bites kisses down the column of his throat, soothing the sharpness of it with the edge of his tongue. He tangles a hand in Crowley’s hair, pulling against his scalp to angle his mouth down again so Aziraphale can kiss it once more, the narrow lips already red and panting.

The Demon tries to lay his hands on Aziraphale but the Angel bats them away, slams them back against the wall without patience. _Ruin me, _Crowley had begged, and Aziraphale has every intention of doing so in the most perfect way possible. Another scrape of teeth against lips and nails against skin and the Angel snaps his fingers again, divesting Crowley of the rest of his clothes.

“Angel - what…”

His hand is between the Demon’s legs, exploring and caressing with a purpose.

“Nng - you - oh fuck - I…”

He kisses him, biting the stutters from his mouth, licking away the low moans rolling from his tongue and working to produce more with long even strokes of his hand.

“I - let me - please…?”

“No,” he says leaving no space for argument. “I intend to fulfill your request.”

Crowley has never known something that can heal and break him at the same time: his thoughts are lost, his body wrung and wrecked and something in him is going to shatter. It's the mirror of Erebus: there he was an endless puppet to pain and the Fall. Here it's more like the spreading of wings from a great height, enveloping the firmament and surrendering to the inevitable... And yet he needs more - is pushing against Aziraphale, his hips shuddering, needing every point of contact he can get. He wants to drink in the Angel and worship him, but he’s forbidden from touching him and that’s an exquisite torture in itself - he gains bruises every time he tries - and he doesn’t remember how he got here, pinned to the wall by an Angel he’s been in love with for almost as long as the Earth has existed. Profanity, half realized in the language of Heaven burns his mouth as love and desire course through him.

“You are beautiful, my dearest,” the Angel whispers reverently against him. “You are utterly transcendent.”

“Nn - angel - I, please - you…”

_“Fall for me.”_

And Crowley is on the edge of a new and terrifying chasm, a feeling that is moments away from engulfing him. _“I - I - anything…”_

_“I’ll catch you,”_ Aziraphale promises against the Demon’s lips, seeking sanctuary in the warmth of Crowley’s mouth, his hands busy elsewhere.

Crowley is kissing him back and gasping little noises of pleasure in between and his body’s on the point of melting or exploding and he can’t tell which and, _“Fuck, Aziraphale - I…”_ He arches his back, both violent and serpentine, and shudders with the force of it, release flooding through him, the feeling so profound it’s almost agony, the ecstasy of it stealing breath and thought and motion. When he finally comes back to himself he’s still trembling, his forehead leaning against the lapel of Aziraphale’s cardigan, nose and mouth nuzzling into the crook of his neck, seeking to bury secrets there. “Love you,” he murmurs, quiet, hesitant and breathless because he can’t quite believe that after all this time he is allowed to even acknowledge the fact, let alone say it.

“And I love you too, my dear - _you’re divine.”_

Crowley lifts his head a little, huffs out a laugh. “’M not.” He’d never known Aziraphale could make two words sound so heartfelt and so filthy at the same time.

“Perhaps you are to me, and that’s enough. Can you walk?”

“Hm?”

“The bed’s just over there.” He’s smiling, a small, prim, bastard sort of smile. “And I haven’t finished with you yet…”

Crowley makes a low strangled noise at the back of his throat.

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes, fuck yes! Can I touch you?” There’s a taut, desperate note running through his voice that sounds like begging.

He laughs. “You are an impatient thing!”

“Demon. We’re not known for our virtues.” And he doesn’t know why he’s still talking when his mouth could be doing something much more worthwhile like tasting Aziraphale’s skin. He sets thought to deed and starts to nip kisses against the Angel’s neck.

Aziraphale makes a pleased little hum, deciding Crowley’s impatience isn’t such a bad thing after all. He maneuvers them both towards the bed, snapping his fingers along the way to send his clothes - neatly folded - to the chair in the corner.

Crowley makes another incoherent sound of desire as he feels the warmth of the Angel’s skin against his. “If She smites me for this it will have been worth it.”

“Really my dear, She wouldn’t do any such thing!”

“How’d you know?”

“Because love is a grace to be cherished above all others. Now, do you wish to discuss divine theology or would you rather…”

“Yes. Both. All of it,” he says hungrily, causing the Angel to laugh and kiss him.

“You’re sublime…” he says in a breathless and wondering tone, eyes wide.

Cowley doubts he is. “I’m…” He doesn’t know how to explain the Want. “I’m empty. I’m all scabs and bruises - I’m a bloody mess.”

“Then you’re a sublime bloody mess.”

Aziraphale is holding him and staring at him like he could eat him with a spoon and Crowley can’t stand any more: his legs don’t function as they ought and he has no idea whether that’s his lingering wounds or Aziraphale. He falters and the Angel holds him, lays him down upon the bed.

“Crowley?”

“Mm?”

“Are you alright?”

His eyes are half-lidded, golden-rod in colour and his pupils have thinned to no more than a lick of black as if to defend him from the light, to shield him from any other bright sensation because this one might just kill him. The Angel’s aura is a vast and blazing thing capable of carving him to pieces and razing him to ash and yet - and yet - it curls around him so gently, a million mono-edge filaments woven into a cradle of care. Aziraphale smells like Earl Grey tea, books and beeswax polish with a splash of old-school bay rum aftershave sitting on top. Something beneath all that is harder to describe but is akin to fresh-pressed linen and the cold air notes of the upper atmosphere. The crystalline Angelic scent reminds him of the Silver City and a deep-buried sense of betrayal, but for once the hole in his chest doesn’t yawn wider: the storm in him settles - not banished, but quieted. It’s the most peace he’s ever known.

“Crowley?” he prompts gently.

“Mm.”

“Crowley?”

In response the Demon arches his head back, his arms laid at his sides, longing in every line of him, practically writhing, fingers tensing against the sheets and the raw ache inside him. He doesn’t have words - doesn’t even have it in him to ask please.

His wounds give him an earthly aspect that's at odds with his nature. It reminds Aziraphale of paintings of Saint Sebastian, where the suffering is made to look like bliss; everything is betwixt and between as the mortal frame dies and the soul achieves sainthood. Aziraphale is momentarily stuttered to a stop: he remembers, centuries back in Toledo, how vulnerable Crowley had seemed and how he had wanted to care for him but feared to do so. Regrets are not something native to the Heavenly Host, but he experiences an uncomfortable mental twinge and knows it to be remorse. It is impossible to say if his actions since ’41 had been for the best. Perhaps if he had been braver, if he’d been willing to take the risk… No. It would have been Crowley he’d risked, and how could he possibly have done that?

He leans over to dust worshipful kisses across the Demon’s torso, his right hand tracing down the outer edge of Crowley’s arm, his waist, his hip, between his legs, fingertips as hungry as his mouth. “You are the brightest thing in my world. You blaze so beautifully. You are the bravest and most brilliant thing I’ve ever known - and I shall do everything I can to make you feel it.”

Crowley would have thought - had thought in fact - that being a Demon he understood lust. He’s the Serpent of Eden, the tempter to Original Sin - if anyone understands temptation, understands desire, it ought to be him. More than that, he has an imagination - far more than is good for him sometimes - and has Wanted an Angel (his angel) since the beginning. But, Crowley is learning, whilst he has been a reluctant if diligent student in the matter of Wanting, he is a novice when it comes to Having. And Aziraphale’s thorough instruction in the matter is - he’s certain - going to discorporate him. Which would be ironic.

_(What wanker invented irony again? Oh.)_

Aziraphale touches him as if he is precious, lips kissing him with an avid devotion. The Angel’s aura burns with love and longing, blinding bright as the sun, warming every part of him. The Want drinks it down and begs for more, needing to be filled with it, needing to be closer.

Aziraphale obliges. 


	11. Chapter 11

Aziraphale is feeling supremely content with the world - or with his place within it at least. He’s wearing pale blue and white striped flannel pajamas and sitting up in bed. Crowley, wearing nothing at all, is curled beside him with his head and one arm lain across the Angel’s lap. Aziraphale can’t imagine it’s very comfortable as positions go, but the Demon’s fast asleep so he supposes it must be. Gently he traces his fingertips down the edge of Crowley’s cheek to his jaw and then does so again because it makes his blood fizz like champagne. He stokes Crowley’s hair too, and the side of his neck along to one bruised and boney shoulder.

“Beautiful,” he tells him quietly. He wonders if this is how misers feel, this need to never let go of something, to clutch it to themselves and grasp it in their hands, to press it against their chests and let no one else touch it. He chuckles. “Avarice. Oh dear,” he says, not sounding repentant in the least.

“You are marvelous, my dear,” the Angel murmurs in Enochian. “In the truest sense of the word. You are a marvel to me. I’m so very glad you came to speak to me, all that time ago, on the wall of Eden.” He smiles. “Wily serpent… And I am sorry that it took me so long to catch up. I was never as fast as you. But now we’re both here, I promise I shall make it up to you. I shall keep you and protect you - and fight for you, if you’ll allow it… And love you,” he adds fervently. “I shall do that above all. And I’m afraid that I cannot give you a say in the matter of the last, it’s far too late for that. Oh my dearest…”

Without meaning to - it is rather instinctual for a Principality after all - the endearments become a blessing to heal damaged flesh. Aziraphale pulls his hand back guiltily, awaiting the scream that’s sure to come... Crowley remains obstinately asleep. Relieved - if bewildered - the Angel places his fingertips lightly to the back of the Demon’s neck, closes his eyes, and bestows a miracle. Bruises fade from black-purple to yellow-pink and then to no colour at all. Bone strengthens, muscles stitch themselves together, capillaries regrow; scabs harden to keloid scars and then sink and pale to the faintest marks of silver.

Crowley gives a shudder and sighs, the last snarl of tension easing from him, and falls deeper into a warm and dreamless sleep.

* * *

“Good morning dearest.”

Crowley bleary registers that he’s in his bed, sprawlingly curled around Aziraphale. A seed of panic starts to bloom before the entirety of yesterday catches up with him and the panic sprouts into deep confusion and a distrust of his own recollections. Because surely _that _never happened? Or that. Or… “Er… hi,” he hazards.

“How do you feel?”

A correct reply might have been ‘good’ or ‘nice’, but Crowley isn’t good and doesn’t do nice so he’s momentarily stumped. The word he’s really looking for is ‘loved’, but it’s been such a very long time since he’s experienced it he’s forgotten that this is how it feels. He rolls over so he can look up at Aziraphale. “Um. Better?” A pause as he tries to order his thoughts. “Did - did yesterday… happen?”

“Oh, yes, quite categorically,” the Angel tells him with what can only be described as a smirk.

“…All of it?”

“I confess, as you still weren’t feeling your best we didn’t make it all the way down the list.”

“Y-you have a list?”

“Yes. Quite a long one.” The glint in the Angel’s eyes looks positively wicked.

“Oh. Just checking,” Crowley says, sounding slightly dazed. He rubs the last of the sleep from his face and as he does so realizes that he’s no longer in pain. He sits up and prods at his collarbones and then twists so he can inspect the right side of his ribcage. There’s a long silvery crescent showing where the wound used to be. “Huh,” he says and looks questioningly at Aziraphale.

“I did attempt a miracle when we first returned, only I’m afraid it affected you badly. I rather thoughtlessly tried one again last night, and, well…” He gives a little shrug. “I’m sorry dear boy, I hope you’ll forgive me, only I don’t like to see you in pain.”

There is a tinge of colour across the Demon’s cheeks now. “Uh, yeah - no - I mean it’s fine. Thanksss.” Crowley gets up with a feline stretch - he’s certainly not running away - and goes to the bathroom. When he returns he’s wearing a black raw silk kimono, loosely belted at the waist: it looks elegant, expensive and surprisingly comfortable.

He smiles and Aziraphale’s heart stutters faster; it always has in the presence of that wide and easy Serpent-of-Eden-grin that promises mischief and swagger.

“Still got to do something about this disaster,” he says, tugging at the nearest snarl of red against his shoulder and twining it around his finger. Aziraphale looks - disappointed? - wistful? - Crowley isn’t sure. “What? Do - do you like it long?”

It’s his turn to smile. “However you’d rather, dearest. But I must say I enjoyed brushing it.”

Crowley swallows dryly and hopes his face isn’t showing even a quarter of his feelings right now. “Er. Right. I can… leave it for a bit, I suppose.”

The Angel beams like a small sun that’s just been given a birthday gift.

Crowley hastily looks away with a mutter of, _“Bloody death of me,” _before clearing his throat and, “Coffee! I want coffee - you want some? Or tea? Got some Orange Tippy Peko, or Lapsang if you fancy, got a whole cupboard of the stuff…”

Aziraphale catches hold of his hand, to still him and draw him near enough to kiss his cheek. “Darjeeling would be wonderful, thank you.”

Crowley gives a little shiver, but his manic edge is smoothed, gentled down to a more manageable energy. “Righty-right,” he says and saunters off to the kitchen to fill the kettle with fresh water.

* * *

Crowley is on his second cup of coffee and Aziraphale his second cup of tea. The Demon has utilized a pair of black lacquered hashi to pin up his hair and is making toast for them both; he’s hoping his throat doesn’t seize up when it comes to eating it, but he feels more himself today so is willing to give it a try.

There is a certain tone that people use when they have come up with an idea they are very impressed with and yet know it will not be met with the popularity they desire. It’s a breezy sort of tone and Aziraphale is employing it now. “I was thinking we should get a cat.”

“A what?”

“A cat - a kitten - you know, Felis Catus.”

“I - I know what a cat is! What I want to know is why…”

“I think it would be rather good for you.”

Crowley blinks.

“They bat things off desks, sleep a great deal, do as they please and don’t listen to anyone. I thought it might be something you’d like to experience from the other side of the coin as it were.”

“Cats eat snakes, angel.”

Aziraphale briefly purses his lips, annoyed. “You’re not a snake, you’re a Demon who occasionally looks like a serpent. I’m not talking about getting a lion or a tiger for goodness sake! Anyway, didn’t you say you hung out with cats?”

“What? I… well not recently - I meant Egypt.” He takes a selection of preserves (including a very good spiced marmalade) out of the cupboard and puts them on the table. “What would I want with a cat? It’ll just throw up on the floor and pee on the house plants.”

“My dear, the way you abuse those poor plants I wouldn’t put it past you to…”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Eden’s Serpent admonishes with a little hiss of distaste. But it’s strange, he thinks, to be bickering like this, just as they always have as if nothing has changed. As if they never… He examines yesterdays memories again: the unbearable tension of his own feelings, the confessions, the pressure of the wall pushed hard against his spine as the Angel pinned his hands, the taste of skin beneath his lips purifying the whisky and misery on his tongue. And afterwards, in bed, the different ways they had pressed their bodies together, needing to feel one another every way they could, transmuting love to desire and desire to bliss… Did any of that actually happen?

He darts a look at Aziraphale: the Angel is dressed in his customary cream and fawn attire topped off with a tartan bowtie, serenely sipping tea, as if he’d never… As if Crowley had never… The Demon feels the acid bright crawl of anxiety up his spine. He needs to know he didn’t imagine it but it all seems rather unlikely now when examined in the cold light of day - is more unlikely the further he thinks on it. And how could he possibly ask something like that anyway?

_Angel, I just wanted to check - again - in case, y’know, I’ve gone barking mad, but yesterday… Did I say I loved you and then you said it back and I couldn’t believe you so you seduced me up against a wall and then took me to bed where you fucked me ‘til I fell apart and then you put me back together again? Did that, y’know… actually happen?_

No, there’s no way he’s asking that - there has to be another way. Perhaps he could test the waters? Ask Aziraphale something he'd usually dismiss, something that could be thought romantic? Inspiration comes to him just as the toast pops up: he ignores it and snaps his fingers at the music system instead. The Sonos (he really is going to have to do something about that bloody thing) begins to play ‘It’s Probably Me’ by Sting and Eric Clapton which wasn’t even a song he realized he owned. He’s about to glower when he decides the rhythm of it is smooth and slow enough for what he has in mind. He turns to Aziraphale with a flourish and holds out his hand. “Dance with me angel!” he entreats.

“The toast is done, dear…”

“I’ll make more. Dance with me.” A suggestive tilt of his eyebrows: “I’ll even let you lead…”

“I don’t dance. Angels don’t.”

“I don’t either - I mean, not what you’d call dancing - not a formal thing.”

Aziraphale looks undecided about something and then puts his tea down and gives a little pink-cheeked smile. “I learnt the Gavotte.”

Crowley’s eyebrows do something complicated that’s not quite a frown and he lowers his hand, uncertain. This is not going as well as he’d hoped. “That’s - that’s definitely a formal thing.”

“Oh, it was at this gentleman’s club. It was quite the fashion.”

“When?”

“What?”

“When was it the fashion?” His tone holds curiosity but no bite, although his eyes are lit with the smallest spark as if he hopes he _knows _the answer that’s coming his way and is going to use it to his full advantage.

“Back in 1878, I think. I learnt it at the Hundred Guineas Club.”

“I passed out for seventy-nine years whilst you learnt the Gavotte at a rake’s club an’ you won’t bloody dance with me?” He’s mostly incredulous with just a slim sliver of hurt but it’s a sharp and knife-ish hurt and dangerous for all that. “You really are a bastard.”

Aziraphale hadn’t expected Crowley to be upset about that sort of thing (in truth neither had Crowley but the suggestion had segued from foolishness to a legitimate desire and he couldn’t seem to force it back again.) “Oh - oh - I - it’s not that!” The Angel seeks to make amends. “It’s just that, it’s just that I do always think that if one is to do things one ought to do things properly.”

Crowley’s head tips to the side, puzzling the statement. “You won’t dance unless it’s a piece you know?”

“Well, yes, I suppose - I…”

“Are you asking me to take _dancing __lessons _with you?”

Aziraphale looks flustered, caught off-guard. “Ah… ye…?”

_“Deal,” _the Demon says before the single syllable of ‘yes’ is even completed. (Not even Mephistopheles has ever been faster in sealing a contract.)

He stares at Crowley for a moment as if he can’t quite believe what just happened. And then he smiles and it’s an expression brimful of so many things all woven together: fondness and exasperation, admiration, care, amusement, and an infinite ribbon of love. He shakes his head and goes to the Demon; he puts his hands against the raw silk of the robe, pressing against the torso beneath, breathes kisses along his jaw, down his neck and across the central edge of both collarbones that can be seen in the long open V of the kimono.

Crowley lets out a soft keen, his eyes closed, all of him unsteady.

“You are a wily, terrible thing,” Aziraphale says with mock severity. “And I love you for it.”

_Oh!_

“Let’s not bother about the toast.”


	12. Chapter 12

Crowley is not expecting anyone and he turns sharply at the sound when the bell to his flat is rung in the early afternoon. His eyes narrow for a moment before he reasons that the only Aetherial or Occult being to bother ringing the bell politely like that would be Aziraphale, meaning his interruption is of the Human variety. (The Angel is due this evening after he closes the bookshop.) He grabs his sunglasses out of habit and goes to answer the door.

There is a woman standing in the hallway; she’s attractive in a no-nonsense sort of way. Her hair is starting to grey and she’s wearing boots and the sort of dress that forty year olds who’ve forgotten they’re no longer thirty wear. She is carrying a large wicker basket.

Through a supreme effort of will, Crowley manages not to recoil. “What the - what the fuck is that?” he asks weakly.

“Is this flat nine?”

“Er...?”

She gives a little laugh. “Oh - look it says so on the door! Don’t mind me, my glasses broke - I’ve been blind as a bat all day, it’s terrible! Well anyway, this is yours,” she offers him the basket. “There’s an information pack in there, it will tell you everything you need - and there’s formula too, all the basics, just to get you started.”

Crowley stares blankly from behind his sunglasses. He hadn’t realized before but the basket is making noises, quite insistently and at a high pitch. Curiosity is a terrible thing; he peers down despite himself, pulling edges of fleece material aside to investigate. Something small, fluffy and golden immediately locks itself onto his sleeve and refuses to let go: he pulls his arm back in alarm but the thing remains attached.

“It’s a rescue cat - kitten really - I was meant to… _is _this flat nine?”

“Nnng?” Crowley tries. He’s managed to extract the thing from his sleeve and is now holding it in his palm.

“Nine. The flat. I was meant to bring it to nine, but - do you live here? Only this seems to have come as a surprise to you, which is rather… unusual. Er, it was organized by a,” she checks a piece of paper from the basket. “Mr A Z Fell. Is that your…”

_“Bastard,”_ Crowley mutters at the same time as the woman offers, “…partner?”

“The adoption fee to the shelter is non-refundable I’m afraid, but if you don’t want to take it then I’ll return it to be re-adopted. We don’t want to house animals where they’re unwelcome.”

The Demon’s mouth twists as he tries to calculate how much trouble one feline can cause versus how much trouble he’d be in with Aziraphale if he sends it back. He pulls his sunglasses down so he can glower at it over the rim of the lenses. The kitten stares back and starts to purr, a surprisingly loud vibration for something so small.

_Damn you Pasht-Sekhmet._

“Alright, fine. Great. Yep. I’ll take it.” He practically grabs the basket from the woman with his free hand, flinging it into the flat - “Have a nice life,” - and slams the door shut.

* * *

“Angel,” Crowley says with a triumphant and slightly devious grin as he opens the door for him at six-forty.

“Oh, I see you two have become acquainted - wonderful.” He nods to the small desert-gold kitten sitting in a wobbly manner on the Demon's shoulder, bolstered up by the press of one dark wing behind it. “Suits you.”

“Mm,” Crowley hums sounding predatory. “Gotta have the wings - little sod falls off otherwise. Doesn’t wanna sit anywhere else though.” The kitten purrs louder and looks smug. “This is Dante. Dante, this is Aziraphale. He’s mine - paws off.”

“Crowley, do you actually speak cat?” he asks as he’s ushered into the flat and the door is closed behind him.

“Hard to say. I reckon they understand perfectly, it’s just whether they listen or not.”

“I know the feeling well...”

“What?” he calls suspiciously.

“Nothing dear boy.”

“Did you bring any wine with you?”

“Oh, I did, I thought we’d have some Côtes du Rhône this evening.”

Crowley returns from the kitchen with glasses and a corkscrew. “Did I ever tell you about the time I led a rat army?”

Aziraphale’s face goes though several expressions before settling on wry. “It must have slipped your mind. Was it a particularly wicked wile I failed to thwart?”

He gives an unconcerned sniff as he perches on the arm of the sofa, letting his wings trail down the back. “Naah, was just a Monday. You pour an’ I’ll begin.” He glances at the kitten on his shoulder, its paws folded beneath itself, its eyes closed in contentment. He grins at it. “You listen too, Dante - this is good - you’ll like this…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No I don't know why Crowley ended up with a Abyssinian kitten either other than Aziraphale has a slightly odd sense of humour.
> 
> Well, there we go, all done.
> 
> Thank you for reading - (passes the metaphorical hat around) all comments and kudos gratefully received =)
> 
> Should anyone feel inspired to draw anything from this I'd love to see it!


End file.
